So after those 4,000 words screaming about how “The Mirror” CHANGES EVERYTHING, albeit drunkenly, we reach an episode that’s distinctly not this new changed Gargoyles that “The Mirror” promised. There’s no magic here, and in fact it’s about the most grounded story we’re ever going to get from this show. It’s a bottle episode, of sorts—well, not really, since it uses a whole bunch of new settings—but in the sense that it uses an extremely minimal cast and tight standalone story. It’s safe. It wraps up and doesn’t rely on much of what we’ve seen before. But you know what? No one said filler had to be bad, especially when that filler is a whole-plot homage to noir. And as this episode points out, no episode of Gargoyles is unimportant.

I barely remembered a single beat from “The Silver Falcon” before this rewatch. I knew the shot of Elisa on a falcon on a tower, because that’s the image used on the DVD menu. I remembered it was film noir. I remembered it had something to do with Matt (though I honestly got it confused with the revelations in…”Revelations.”) The most likely reason for this is that I probably only ever saw it once; I didn’t get into the show until around 10 years ago, and I saw the bulk of season 2’s first half for the first time on DVD. Being that this episode didn’t have audio commentary or wasn’t an instant favorite of mine like certain others, I doubt I ever would have popped it in and watched it. I hesitate to say it’s “forgettable” because of the connotation there, but it’s also not one that feels particularly memorable. Or it doesn’t try to be.

That’s a little sad, because watching this episode with near-fresh eyes was immensely enjoyable. Greg mentions in the DVD intro that this was a way for the new story editor to start out small, and it looks even smaller when compared to the grandioseness that was “The Mirror.” But it’s insanely well-done and entertaining, even with the usual logical slip-ups.

What makes “The Silver Falcon” work best from the get-go is its mise-en-scene. The entire episode looks beautiful.

Siiiiingin’ in the Rain! …Wrong movie?

I almost wish we didn’t get Broadway watching a classic detective noir film, just because the look of the episode is so good that it doesn’t need the comparison. But there are surely viewers who don’t know who Humphrey Bogart is, so it’s probably necessary.

“Now kiss!”

Broadway is hanging out at Elisa’s house to watch it since Lex and Brooklyn have dibs on the castle’s VCR (HAHA VCR). There are some nice callbacks to their friendship established in “Deadly Force”, particularly that Elisa specifically keeps her gun in a lockbox in a drawer. She gets a call from Chief Chavez, who tells her that Matt’s disappeared and hasn’t checked in in 48 hours. Elisa isn’t worried since Matt’s an obsessive loon about conspiracy theories, but she’s off to do her duty. Broadway, high off of the noir film’s mantra about having a partner, wants to join her.

She might be a little high on something too.

Elisa shuts him down, insisting she work alone. This ties in nicely with her no-partner mentality from back in “The Edge”, which she notably did not get over in that episode and has simply put up with Matt since he was assigned. It’s more pronounced when she finds a masked man rummaging through Matt’s apartment…and Broadway shows up and kind of screws everything up.

To be fair, seeing Elisa shoot and possibly murder the fleeing man MIGHT have been kind of dark.

Broadway’s in a trenchcoat and fedora, obviously trying to imitate the noir detectives from the TV. Though, one has to wonder exactly where and how Broadway could get a trenchcoat and fedora that big, but eh. The more important thing to wonder is HOW DOES NO ONE IN THE APARTMENT COMPLEX HEAR THIS RUCKUS. Even with all the screaming and throwing and Broadway tearing through the elevator shaft, not a single soul erupts into the hallway asking what the fuck is going on. Elisa is pissed and wants to get out of the hallway, but nothing scrapes on how she’s going to explain it on her police report or how everyone in the complex must be dead.

WHY DIDN’T THIS WAKE ANYONE UP?!

Elisa finds a note from Matt’s calendar in the pocket of the perp that’s about a meeting at Cleopatra’s eye, in handwriting that is “definitely Matt’s.”

Elisa can read invisible ink, didn’t you know?

Broadway checks his computer, but as soon as he turns it on it EXPLODES. Not that it will wake anyone in this fucking apartment complex.

In all seriousness, there were people in the 90s who thought this would actually happen if you got a computer virus.

Elisa is pissed, of course, even though she herself could have very easily made that mistake. She understandably sends him away, but Broadway smartly refutes that “Matt was no amateur and he worked alone, and look at where it got him!” The point of this episode begins to unveil itself.

Elisa meets Matt’s contact at Cleopatra’s Needle, a new location that is seldom seen in shows that take place in Manhattan. This entire episode has some inspired setting choices, but this is definitely the best just from its sheer originality—and place in real life.

Even though it’s totally not even a needle.

Matt’s contact is Hacker, his former partner in the FBI. Apparently Matt was ousted from the FBI because he was too obsessive, which is news to Elisa. What a great bit of character information! Matt has thus far been mostly comic relief with his looniness, but there’s a large sum of tragedy underlying it, it seems. His leads on the Illuminati ended hs career, and now they’ve gotten him kidnapped. Luckily, Hacker provides Elisa with the next clue: a 70 year old letter.

The most realistic depiction of handwriting we’ve ever had on this show.

Suddenly, the story is a bit grander. More than that, it feels distinctly noir; names like Mace Malone and a mysterious “DD,” and a letter that goons desperately want to bury. Broadway chases off the goons, and Elisa makes her way to the address on the letter.

I was going to make a “Now kiss!” joke again, but…those eyes.

Elisa makes it over to the address, where a CPA has made the room his office. Broadway keeps a watchful eye on the next skyscraper over, which contains its own clue…

Whatta coinkeydink!

The subtle clues in this episode are wonderful, and probably work best because the mystery itself isn’t terribly complex. There’s a seemingly-throwaway line of the CPA calling DD “a sharp-looking young feller” that works wonders on second viewing. Nothing here is totally genius, but it doesn’t have to be, because the episode is about spinning a classic detective yarn. The tropes are all there, and they’re being played straight. And there’s nothing wrong with that so long as it’s engaging, which it is.

He’s definitely a bad guy.

Elisa figures out that what was formerly the Silver Falcon night club is the one mentioned in the letter, and heads over, Broadway in tow.

Parallel shot!

After breaking in, it seems that Tony Dracon and his men are behind this, digging under the building with Matt held hostage and completely blindfolded for no good reason outside of plot convenience. What does Dracon have to do with Matt’s investigation into the Illuminati? Who knows, but what really matters is that he’s got stupid skunk hair now.

It turns out they were waiting for Elisa and Broadway to show up, set a trap that caves the two in where they’re standing. Broadway tries to hold up the debris, but turns to stone before he can dig them out.

First thing: that Broadway turns to stone without actually being in the sun, proving that the turn is totally biological and not reliant on the sun itself, is super cool. But even cooler is the exquisitely clever effect before it, where the glowing light from his eyes is the only light provided in the scene, and repeatedly flashes on and off as he blinks. It’s not necessary to the episode, but it’s such an imaginative element to play with that I can’t help but be a little giddy.

Of course, being Gargoyles, there has to be laser for no reason.

The whole point of burying Elisa was to both kill Elisa and get rid of the letter, the last piece of evidence (I guess?) Matt smartly points out that they don’t know if she actually had the letter, so they pull her out to make sure they get it. Some brief exposition reveals that DD is Dominic Dracon, Tony Dracon’s grandfather, and he and Mace Malone performed a jewel heist. Malone dipped out before giving Dracon his cut, though, and the Dracon family has been searching for it ever since. Matt, meanwhile, admits that he jumped to the wrong conclusions about Dracon or Malone’s connections to the Illuminati, and laments not bringing Elisa in on it. Of course the “partners are good” lesson here is obvious, but it’s also nice to Elisa and Matt on good terms like they are in spite of the sticky situation.

All Dracon finds in the dig is a note from Mace, saying, “Right idea, wrong falcon.” Elisa wises up to what’s going on, and promises to take Dracon to the real jewels, so long as he lets she and Matt go after. Also, they have to wait until nightfall…which means Elisa and Matt are kept captive for the next 12 hours, which is pretty horrible to think about.

ELISA ZIP UP YOUR JACKET IT’S WEIRD.

That night, Broadway awakens and cleans his face.

Gotta look good to save lives!

He also reads the crumbled up note from Mace Malone with some struggle, calling back to him learning to read. Meanwhile, Matt discovers his apartment—and thus his home and all his possessions—blew up in a fiery blaze. His reaction, as expected, is literally “d’oh!”

Aw, fiddlesticks.

Elisa takes them to the Not Chrysler Building, which is parallel to Mace Malone’s old office. What’s on the Not Chrysler Building? Silver falcon decor, which doesn’t look so silver anymore thanks to 70 years of soot. It’s pretty obvious where this is going.

“She’s going to USE A MAGIC SPELL TO MAKE THE FALCON COME ALIVE AND EAT EVERYONE” – Drunk Weisman resurfaces.

She grabs the bag with the jewels, and then…well…it’s best put by Glasses: “That wacko dame took a dive!”

Great lesson for the kids.

Have I mentioned that the dialogue in this episode is spot-on? Gargoyles dialogue tends to be typically flowery, but the noir material lets it also feel very old fashioned. There are lots of rhymes and alliteration, lots of archaic idioms, lots of clunky, wordy sentences that are sing-songy enough that they’re still pleasant to the ears. It’s pretty great.

As you may have guessed, she jumped because she knew Broadway was there, the man for her all along.

Now kiss!

Broadway takes out the helicopter’s hydrolics, and in the chaos Matt gets his pseudo-badass moment.

THE APARTMENT HAS KIND OF BEEN AVENGED!

Dracon gets off the plane and starts running like a maniac, half looking for the wacko dame’s bloody smooshed corpse, and half running from whatever took out the helicopter, probably. Broadway shows up and takes him out rather humiliatingly, quoting the movie: “When someone messes with your partner, you’re supposed to do siomething about it. Case closed.” And just flicks the shit out of him.

SKUNK HEAAAAAAD

And rips off his tattered rags and…throws them in the garbage?

He’s not littering, I guess.

Elisa, meanwhile, SCALED THE ENTIRE BUILDING WHAT THE FUCK GIRL. At the top, the CPA from earlier reappears, revealing himself to have been Dominic Dracon all along!

I TOLD YOU!

Elisa had already figured it out, in true detective fashion, since he was the only one who knew she was going to the night club, which was booby trapped. This twist isn’t exactly riveting, but you know what? I didn’t predict it, and I’ve seen the episode at least once before. The clues are all there, it all checks out, and Darren McGavin of Kolchak fame fits the mold superbly as Dominic. Everything here, with Elisa standing her ground atop a tall building, wind bellowing and shadows aplenty, is just so good. It’s not particularly tense, since Dominic doesn’t pose much of a threat, and in fact as soon as Elisa throws the bag on the falcon it’s surprising he doesn’t immediately fall to a Disney death. Nothing mindblowing is happening here, but its tone fits the film style it’s paying homage to so well.

In the end, the bag of gems turns out to be yet another trick by Mace, as its filled with marbles and a note telling Dominic that “crime doesn’t pay.”

At least he didn’t……Lose his marbles.Eh? Ehhhh?

Dominic doesn’t fall to his death, surprisingly, in perhaps the one subversion of film noir tropes this episode does (aside from featuring a gargoyle, I guess.) Instead, all the bad guys are arrested, and the episode ends with Matt having appreciation for Elisa and Elisa having appreciation for Broadway. “We pulled it off…partner.”

He’s so HAPPY!

We’ve seen the show go very cynical and very bright and soft, and “The Silver Falcon” sits comfortably in the middle of the two. It’s got lots of people being selfish and awful, and technically the stakes are higher than the last couple of weeks’, but nothing is being said about humanity as a whole. It’s a crime story. It gets solved. There’s not much else to it. It’s not perfect—the ridiculousness of no one in the apartment waking up is still hilariously stupid, and exactly why the Dracons were only just now deciding to act on the 70-year suspicion isn’t clear, (that letter was addressed to DD…did he not find that letter until now somehow?)

But that aside, the mystery itself is quite fun in a simple way, and is helped by all the subtle clues sprinkled throughout. The very simplistic lesson of “don’t take your partner for granted” is well-handled too, considering Elisa and Broadway and Elisa and Matt both have unique buddy-cop relationships within the show. The episode also has very good interior continuity, with Broadway’s trenchcoat steadily disintegrating over the course of the episode, or all of Elisa’s zipping and unzipping of her jacket throughout. And the extensive use of new and original settings makes this episode feel distinctly different. It’s all in the details for this week, and that’s what makes it entertaining in spite of this episode seemingly having nothing to do with anything.

That’s something “The Silver Falcon” highlights, actually. Gargoyles doesn’t have a singular plot arc, it has a whole bunch of sprawling character arcs that produce episodic plots. Most shows aren’t able to handle that, and end up either collapsing under the weight or generating a giant story or mission to gain some focus. Gargoyles, at least during this stage,is like what Lost tried to be had it not become bogged down by the mysteries of the Island. There is nothing central to Gargoyles, which is why you can have a season start off with such disparate, unlinked plots and still feel like a cohesive series. We’ve gone from comic book superheroes to nihilistic body horror to a 90s virtual reality Shakespeare homage to a morality tale about literacy to magical cartoon farce to a film noir detective homage. What in the ever living fuck is this show?

If I may break my already-oft-broken rule of “acting like I’ve never seen future episodes,” that’s what’s so striking about this episode. This is, for all intents and purposes, a standalone in every sense of the world. But tiny elements all come into play later, or at the very least build on events of the past. The subtle character developments, continuing relationships like Elisa and Broadway, Broadway’s reading, insight into Matt’s history, or the Illuminati references, they’re all things that carry over in the upcoming episodes, and that make this a cohesive TV show even when there isn’t a plot that ties it together. “The Silver Falcon”, and ultimately the episodes that will succeed it, show the prowess Gargoyles has for mixing its episodic storytelling with long-form stories. That’s what allows it to excel at throwing out these random ideas with a low rate of failure. Here’s looking at you, Gargoyles. You’re on a roll.

Next time: Baby, I’m howling for you.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/seventy-years-worth-of-soot-the-silver-falcon/feed/120durkinator2720Siiiiingin' in the Rain! ...Wrong movie?"Now kiss!"46WHY DIDN'T THIS WAKE ANYONE UP?!Elisa can read invisible ink, too.In all seriousness, there were people in the 90s who thought this would actually happen if you got a virus.10The most realistic depiction of handwriting we've ever had on this show.13Whatta coinkeydink!He's definitely a bad guy.Parallel shot!Oh come on, this HAS to be intentional!Of course, being Gargoyles, there has to be laser for no reason.ELISA ZIP UP YOUR JACKET IT'S WEIRD.28Aw, fiddlesticks.30Great lesson for the kids.Now kiss!THE APARTMENT HAS BEEN AVENGED!34He's not littering, I guess.I TOLD YOU!At least he didn't... ...Lose his marbles. Eh? Ehhhh?He's so HAPPY!A Romp Indeed: “The Mirror”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/a-romp-indeed-the-mirror/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/a-romp-indeed-the-mirror/#commentsThu, 20 Feb 2014 03:16:10 +0000http://gargoylesweliveagain.com/?p=1018Continue reading →]]>

A lot of shows hit a turning point in season 2. Most of the time, these are big, dark or momentous occasions–a shocking twist, a major death, a big reveal–and from then on the show is never the same, and the momentum keeps going throughout its golden years. While we have some major multi-parters coming up, it’s this episode that really shakes up the landscape of the Gargoyles universe and its possibilities, even if it underplays it as a silly standalone comedy. Also, there’s no way Weisman and co. weren’t totally hammered while writing this. Because this mess is wacky.

“The Mirror” is intimidating to write about, if anything because Greg Weisman has made it clear many times that it’s his personal favorite. That’s kind of a big deal, considering TV writers will often play coy about picking favorites, and Weisman himself tends to be the coyest of the bunch on every other subject. So clearly this one means a lot to him for one reason or another, though it’s admittedly hard to pin down exactly what that reason may be. Particularly because it’s just really goddamn weird, like the writer’s room went on an all-night bender and just-so-happened to write down their stupid ideas when they got back to work hungover the next morning.

The episode starts off pretty weird from the first minute, as it has Elisa undercover as a museum security guard just…because, I guess. But the bit with the reflection in the titular mirror not moving with real life is nice.

Do…do people really pose like that when they’re alone…?

Demona shows up, naming Elisa “the most useless member of a craven, puny race,” and proceeds to rip the shit out of the velvet rope that she could have just, I dunno, walked around.

Necessary.

But, of course, Goliath has Elisa’s back, and the three continue to break all kinds of shit in the museum without setting off any alarms. Demona gets some distance by making massive leaps, a cool animalistic feature we haven’t seen gargoyles do at this point. Elisa and Goliath lose her, as expected, and throughout all this two flunkies run in and still steal the unguarded mirror.

“And then Elisa does that librarian thing where she takes off her glasses and lets her hair down and we see she’s been SEXY ALL ALONG!”“But Greg, Elisa doesn’t wear glasses or have her hair up–““SEXY ALL ALONG!”-A conversation between Drunk Weisman and his DD Lydia Marano, the screenwriter.

Oh, and lest not forget–

SHIPPEEEEEEEEEEER FUUUUUUUUUUUEL

But…more on that in a bit. The two flunkies arrive at Demona’s estate—yep, she has a giant mansion, which looks like the house of “Dracula’s daughter,” as one of the flunkies say. Girl’s doing well for herself. We also get a big literary reference by way of the password: “Oberon sent me.”

Why are you still wearing your night vision goggles, dorks?

Demona does a magical spell on the mirror involving ringing some bells and blowing a feather, which is probably something she’s done so often that it’s the equivalent to making a baked potato for her.

Even when we know who she is she’s STILL bad with shadows.

She also spouts an incantation with the names “Titania” and “Puck” in it, which makes it pretty evident what’s coming next. Suddenly, a little elf dude in chains shoots out of the mirror. It’s Puck, of A Midsummer Night’s Dream fame.

BITCH I MIGHT BE

For the kids not following along, The Gargoyles pretty much spell out what’s going on, even if they’re blissfully unaware. This episode takes on something I discussed in the previous episode, where in that case the version of Merlin we know in pop culture is shown to be a real historical figure in their world. This episode takes that idea and runs with it, not only revealing that characters from medieval fantasy and classical literature were real in the past, but also introducing them as actual characters. Yeah, technically we’ve met Macbeth a couple of times, but as far as we know he’s just a dude who has the same namesake.

Here, the object in question is declared to be the famous “Titania’s Mirror.” Now, it’s a little weird that Elisa is still surprised that the characters popularized in Shakespeare’s play are real when there’s a historical object in a museum stated to be owned by Titania. But I’d venture to guess that, much like with Merlin’s scrolls, the definitive history of the mirror is uncertain for historians; realists would assume it was just named that by an owner and as it got passed down stories about it being “magical” came about, just because. We have plenty of “haunted objects” in museums nowadays, so it makes sense. The difference, of course, is that the mythology behind is totally accurate…”if the stories be true,” as Hudson says. It’s the first use of that phrase, but it’s a great summary of how this show tackles the various mythologies it will eventually take on. Maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not. What matters is that if it turns out to be true, you’re gonna have to deal with it. Because being a skeptic won’t help you fight magical monsters and robots.

Anyway, the big thing about this bit is that Titania was the Queen of the Third Race, aka Oberon’s Children, aka Dark Elves, aka Changelings, aka beings of pure magic.

BITCH THEY MIGHT BE

That’s…kind of a big deal.

Despite having spent so much time in the past through the pilot and flashbacks, this show has surprisingly only built a minimal mythology thus far, at least in terms of universe-backstory. We have a lot of elements that make this show distinctly Gargoyles, but other than “Gargoyles existed, they fought Vikings, magic happened sometimes,” we don’t really know jack shit about the world outside of the Manhattan clan. But we know, just from the clues and details—or the fact that fucking gargoyles are walking around—that this universe is vastly different from ours on a fundamental level, even if Manhattan seems similar on base appearance. The explanation of the three races, simple as it may be, opens up so much about the nature of this world and where it can go. With just one line, Gargoyles seems so much bigger. It’s genius. And I can totally picture Weisman drunkenly explaining “Humans, gargoyles, and magical things that can LITERALLY BE ANYTHING ELSE IN EXISTENCE, like elves and the loch ness monster and shit.”

And our first example with this is a smart bridge to potentially weirder things, providing a character that’s very familiar in his human appearance and desires, but still really goddamn weird and alien when it comes to just about everything else. Particularly in how utterly ridiculous his animation is.

Yeah…it doesn’t really come across well in screencaps, particularly because Puck is animated in the same exaggerated, extra-cartoony way “Enter Macbeth” was at times. But unlike that episode’s total mess, Puck’s ultra-cartoonishness must be intentional. No one else has the detail and exaggeration as he does, at least not consistently. In fact, this episode is exquisitely animated and designed aside from one or two usual rough spots, and the best we’ve gotten so far this season. So with that, Puck’s movement stands out even more, giving the guy a very off-kilter feel in a good way. Brent Spiner’s voice for Puck doesn’t instantly work—he has a tendency to play things more low-key and deadpan than they should be, the same issue I had with him voicing Joker in Young Justice—but he grew on me after a few viewings. Particularly in that Spiner is good at making Puck sound equally playful and devious, hiding a bit of cunning underneath the childish jokes without appearing threatening.

Demona mentions, “You serve the human, now you can serve me,” a very quick and weird little line that’s easy to miss and will definitely prove to be irrelevant and never come up in the future. (This show is kind of brilliant, by the way.)

I was going to make a reference to that terrible Fox reality show, “The Swan”, but I don’t think anyone would get it. Trust me, it would have been funny.

Puck is totally cool with doing her bidding and bugs Demona to make him do things, and the interaction between the playful Puck and the dour Demona is classic humor. What’s also funny is that Demona went through all the trouble to get that mirror…and hadn’t been thinking of what she wanted Puck to do. She has to think long and hard before getting to the brilliant idea that, “Oh, I guess I should destroy all humans!” like it’s some big revelation. For all her elaborate plans, the one where we get to see her endgame doesn’t exactly make her seem like the mastermind she’s pretended to be.

It doesn’t matter anyway, since mass genocide would too hard for Puck to do (or, more likely, wouldn’t be very fun so Puck has no interest in doing it.) Instead, Puck messes with her head a bit by showing her what’s bothering her the most—which, as it turns out, is Elisa Maza. Or more specifically, the thought of Elisa rubbing her head all over Goliath’s hunky buff arms, because apparently Demona can’t tell the difference between a human and a purring cat.

That’s…racist?

What’s really awesome about this scene, and what keeps this from playing out like a run-of-the-mill love triangle, is that Demona actually gets an offer to make Goliath love her again. Puck throws it out like it’s no big deal, in fact. That right there would be a wacky episode to do—have the two villains cast off their prior angst, get all lovey-dubby and make a funny, weird romantic comedy out of it. Buffy did that a couple of times, and it worked out okay. Plenty of other fantasies that had foe-yay between heroes and villains have probably done it.

But Demona shoots it down from the start. Hell, she doesn’t just shoot it down, she doesn’t even acknowledge it. What we’ve seen about Goliath wouldn’t really fit if she did, honestly; she’s been fully willing to either totally murder Goliath or make him an emotionless zombie in all of her appearances. There have been no clues whatsoever that she has any love for him left in her heart once she declared him an enemy, no doubt spawned from her feelings of betrayal when he decided to protect the humans. What’s made this conflicting is that her hatred for Elisa has been pretty irrational—yeah, she hates humans, but she’s made it clear that Elisa has been #1 on her kill-human list this whole time. And there really isn’t any reason why other than that Elisa fights alongside Goliath. So there has to be a tinge of jealousy, right? But how can there be jealousy without Demona still having feelings for Goliath? And if she still has feelings for him, then why wouldn’t she wish him to love her again?

“The Mirror” doesn’t really answer these questions, it merely brings them up before flying off the handle and going nuts. But out of all previous appearances, this is the most interesting one for Demona to date. It’s subtle, but that her motivations are not so cut-and-dry—it can’t be just about jealousy, or just about unrequited love, etc.—show that there’s so much more to explore. Reading between the lines, you could infer that perhaps her anger towards Elisa isn’t so much about how she and Goliath have a spark, but that Elisa is somehow worth Goliath’s attention. One of Demona’s first lines in the episode has her calling Elisa “the most useless member” of her race. But we already know from “Awakening, Part Five” that she’s projected her own faults onto other people before. So, perhaps, her frustration isn’t that Elisa isn’t worthy of Goliath. Instead, Demona’s frustration is that she herself isn’t worthy of Goliath. For her, Elisa is the representation of those feelings of worthlessness.

There will surely be more discussion on Demona’s stupidly complex thought processes on a future date, but for now we get lots of fun with wordplay. Demona asks to get rid of “that human,” to which Puck asks, “that human or that human” bit, which is such a Greg Weisman thing to do. Puck places the emphasis on human, and we get…

The Gargoyles ogle her, which you can’t really blame them for. What lets this initially function as more than fanservice is Elisa’s reaction; the spell tries to cover itself by having Elisa think she was always a gargoyle. Even further, she thinks Goliath and the others have changed into gargoyles, because I guess the first year of the show wouldn’t make any sense if they hadn’t been what Elisa is thinking was the dominant race. The memory caveat of spell is…still kind of stupid when you think about it, though, since everyone else retains memory of her real form, so it doesn’t benefit anyone other than make Elisa look like kind of an idiot. For example, Goliath asks Elisa what happened when they met, she mentions how she fell off a skyscraper and Goliath glided down and saved her, and it’s this big point of confusion because of course she can’t glide with wings! Goliath’s reaction is something along the lines of “No shit, moron.” It’s a weird aspect to insert into the proceedings that gets brushed off quickly, but it’s surely meant to be a cover for what happens later.

“Elisa Maza the human is no more,” Puck precisely tells Demona, prompting her to ask to do it to all the humans in the city. She brings Puck to the top of the World Trade Center where he can channel and project his energy better, and literally keeps him on a leash.

She’s a real ball and CHAIN, amirite?

Meanwhile, Goliath is gliding around with Elisa. The conversation is…hilarious: “I never realized when you were human how beautiful you are” / “You mean you thought I was ugly?” / “Well…uhhhhh…” It’s kind of a joke, but it’s interesting since there’s the impression that Elisa still thought Goliath was an attractive stud when she first met him (and I mean, don’t we all?) Apparently the feeling wasn’t mutual with Goliath at the time, at least on the physical level.

“I thought your beauty was on the inside, but your inside is acting kinda dumb now…”

It is strange that Elisa’s naivete is upped quite a lot for the sake of the humor, to the point that Salli Richardson’s line readings are even a higher octave. It’s the spell doing it, of course (and we’ll see that it makes everyone extra blissfully unaware, apparently) so it doesn’t really have negative implications, but it’s still a little jarring to see a smart character be so… not smart.

That said, it results in the first (only?) appearance of sassy eye-roller Goliath, who gets 100% done with Elisa’s shit in about 0.2 seconds, and you can’t help but love it. Considering everything Goliath’s faced since 994 has pretty much been relentless tragedy and life-or-death violence, a “problem” that’s really only an inconvenience and has him facepalming instead of roaring in rage is refreshing.

“Then Goliath will FACEPALM like they do on that TNG meme! CRAZY CONNECTION!”“Sir, no one will get that joke until 2007…”“STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION!!!”

Puck passes out after casting his spell. The light from its casting summons The Gargoyles to the tower to figure out just what the hell is going on.

Demona also picks at Puck with her tail, which is so weird but so perfect.

Demona gets away with Puck but not the mirror. When she gets to street level, though, she realizes that Puck didn’t make all the humans disappear, he turned everyone in gargoyles. Or as Demona puts it, “gave them the privilege of being a gargoyle.” Also, it’s the middle of the night and tourists are now out with their children, so something is definitely off.

That kid is clearly adopted.

That’s all fun and crazy, but what are the implications for the world when this happens? Like, okay, the spell causes the changed person to think this is how they always looked. Fine. Anyone not affected by the spell does notice the change, though, and at least in the clan everyone remembers what happened afterwards. Now, for simplicity’s sake, it’s very likely that Puck made sure the city’s memories were wiped of the events and only kept the clan’s intact. What is less likely, but more troublesome, is that this is New-freaking-York, where thousands of pictures are taken or things are filmed at any given time, even before the advent of smartphones. Think of how many live news broadcasts are filmed in New York. Even assuming this is strictly the island of Manhattan and no other locale, there’s going to be a lot of live feeds and recordings of what people looked like during the night they became gargoyles. Did Puck make all electronic recording material scramble during this point? Did he wipe it from existence when the spell was undone? I don’t think Puck would really care much about that, especially given the kind of playful chaos that would erupt from the world having random recordings of people as gargoyles, but no one with any memory of where they came from. Not that it will ever be mentioned again (will it?)

There’s a missed opportunity here, too, in that we could have seen gargoyle redesigns for other recurring characters. What about gargoylified members of The Pack? Or Matt? Or David fucking Xanatos as a fucking gargoyle! Time and money, I know, but damn would that have been cool. I guess they have to save something for the fanart.

Also, our heroes fall down the stairs. So there’s that.

I love that pretty much everyone is extra dumb in this episode for absolutely no reason.

After seeing the rest of the world in Gargoyle form, Lex gets the quote that encapsulates the entire episode: “It’s too weird. Kinda fun…but weird.”

Usually guys standing around in nothing but loincloths while ogling women in a crowded subway get arrested.

Demona just does not fucking get this whole “semantics” and “specificity” thing, and throws out another vague command to Puck to “turn the gargoyles into humans!” Which does pretty much exactly what you’d expect, with Goliath mid-air.

There’s no way she didn’t take a peek under that loincloth during the fall.

Elisa catches Goliath, it’s all platonically romantic, they go through the same “We’ve always been human, we’ve never needed wings to glide before!” stuff, yadda yadda. This is really just a way to transition to the next phase of the episode, where fan-art comes to life. (Because there’s definitely an online audience for recreating non-human characters as humans.) The designs of the human gargoyles are very good, in terms of representing the most human character traits of their previous forms. And it’s pretty cool that Goliath isn’t actually a white guy, unlike everyone else. They’re almost too good though, and the eerieness of their designs makes them…less than easy on the eyes. I mean, they were all pretty darn attractive as gargoyles. As humans? Ehhhhhhhh….

Brooklyn went from being the “hot one” to “a decrepit grayscale version of the Wicked Witch of the West.”

After gathering their bearings, The Humans decide to stage a battle with Demona to undo the damage—well, “damage,” since the stakes aren’t all that high–and summon her and Puck with the mirror. And then it just goes iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinsssssssssssaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnnnnnnne.

Magic thus far has been kind of terrible. The most prevalent use of magic has been to curse or kill people, either in sadistic ways like resurrecting a corpse with multiple souls, or boring ways like shooting bolts of lighting out of your hand. For the first time, magic…well…literally does anything. Anything. There are no rules here. It’s utter chaos, and the only reason everything doesn’t collapse in on itself is because Puck doesn’t really have his heart set on hurting people, just having fun. He just looks so happy the whole time!

REDRUMREDRUMREDRUM

It’s all so exaggerated, too, with even the less-magical fight scenes being upped to the most generic action movie levels. Goliath fights Demona with medieval weapons that just so happen to fall on top of him. Demona even gets a badass boast: “Now to end this farce!” Then we get a bit where the Trio takes her down, but passers by think they’re monsters attacking her.

Need I say more? Demona is beaten, the good guys get Puck to turn everyone back, Puck gets more of his Puck faces.

And everything is back to normal.

Was…that guy already not wearing shoes before he changed? Or did the entire city of Manhattan lose their shoes this night? If so, what a calamity.

Puck grabs Demona and teleports her away, feeling indebted to her for giving him so much fun. Demona is the funniest she’s ever been, not even angry or upset so much as just annoyed and disappointed. He decides to give her one last gift: that she no longer has to turn to stone. Demona still seems annoyed about it for some reason, but that’s kind of her schtick I guess.

“I can make them think THEY farted, not you!”

The Gargoyles, meanwhile, are actually kind of disappointed that the whole ordeal is over, Hudson noting “I would like to have seen the sun, just once.” Even more evident is the conversation between Goliath and Elisa: “I know, you’re as relieved as I am that things have gone back to normal.” / “That’s not what I was going to say…”

Imma eat your hand nomnomnom

“I know, but that’s the way it is,” Elisa says.

Thank god it’s only…48 episodes of unresolved sexual tension to go.

WHERE DID THOSE PATHOS COME FROM?!

This is such a dumb, ridiculous episode from the first second that its final few seconds very much sneak up. The show has done this before, with the shocker at the end of “Leader of the Pack”, but that was more about an episode-long misdirect. “The Mirror” teases this silly little romp, delivers a silly little romp, but closes with the most succinct, definitive development between Goliath and Elisa’s will they/won’t they relationship we’ve ever had. Had Demona not been involved, maybe they could have let Puck keep things the way they were for a while? There simply wasn’t much danger in what Puck did in the grand scheme of things.

After all, Gargoyle!Manhattan seemed like a weirdly happy place; lots of families on the street in the middle of the night without fear, everyone smiling and going about their day. A bearded lady is walking around with her kid and no one bats an eye. We only got a snippet of it, but Puck kind of created a better world, and one where our tortured heroes could have been accepted. Or alternatively, they could have spent time as humans, living among the creatures they protect and seeing the wonders of the day. Goliath and Elisa could have totally hooked up.

But that’s not the way it is. A big evil caused it all to happen, and changing people’s very identities against their will is not a very heroic thing to do. Maybe they could have asked Puck to keep the spell in place for a little longer, to let everyone experience some new things without the dread of Demona lingering over them. But I’d argue that cutting the adventure short eased the pain a bit. Elisa and Goliath aren’t exactly happy that the day is saved this time around; they had their feelings for one another exposed more than ever before, and had them ripped away just as quickly. All it did was reinforce just how different the two of them really are on a physical level. It’s kind of horrible for Elisa especially, who was finally called beautiful by Goliath…only to be shifted back into the form he inferred was, well, not as beautiful to him. He’d probably beg to differ, but you can’t blame her for shutting him down at the end of the episode with that hanging above her head.

Oh, and lest we forget the massive gamechanger on a plot level, when Demona finds out what Puck’s spell really means.

“And then–get this–and then Demona ends up TURNING HUMAN DURING THE DAY. And it’s like that FOR-FREAKING-EVER!”“But Greg, that’s a massive plot twist to throw into a standalone episo–““FOOOOOORRREEEEEEVVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRRRR”

“The Mirror” honestly plays like a piece of Gargoyles fanfiction. Now, it’s not bad fanfiction, mind you; I know I have to tread lightly when using “fanfiction” kind of derogatorily, since the only people who read this blog are going to be the kinds of people who write Gargoyles fanfiction. When I say it plays like that, I mean structure-wise. Essentially, the episode is a form of wish-fulfillment. I mean, yeah, that’s obvious in an episode where wishes are literally being granted. But things that were once subtext are turned into plot points, the rules of the world are suddenly exaggerated, and there’s a lot of “what if?” stuff that almost feels like an AU story. It’s the silliest, funniest, weirdest episode the show has put out thus far. Weisman probably had more fun breaking this story than any other, because they got to sort of rewrite the rules of the show for a week. “Let’s make Elisa a gargoyle, guys! Hell, let’s make EVERYBODY a gargoyle! And Goliath and Elisa will want to get together! And…dude, dude, dude...let’s MAKE THE GARGOYLES HUMANS! HOLY SHIT MINDBLOWN RIGHT?!?!”

But, lo and behold, that’s really the only reason it works. You wanted a fun episode? You fucking got a fun episode. And none of this is dumb in the way it’s presented; there are plenty of holes, but most of the details are so clever that it covers up any potential problems. It’s as entertaining and brilliant as those stupid ideas sound to you when you’re still drunk, except they actually are. So here, we have an episode that throws out a lot of silly shit, executes it well, essentially gives you canonized versions of Gargoyles fan-art, finally acknowledges the primary romance, and totally blows the universe out of the water. Gargoyles really, truly introduced magic this time, and established that absolutely anything can happen in this world. You can’t really expect things to be the same after that.

Next time: A whole lot less magic.

(Disclaimer: My allegations that Greg Weisman is a drunkard are purely satire. He seems like a professional guy and would probably never come into work intoxicated. Probably. But, I mean, come on.)

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/a-romp-indeed-the-mirror/feed/166durkinator27661Necessary.678Still bad with shadows.10BITCH I MIGHT BE131745464748I was going to make a reference to that terrible Fox reality show, "The Swan", but I don't think anyone would get it. Trust me, it would have been funny if you remembered the she show.That's...racist?"Dude, think about it. Gargoyle. Elisa. And she's in a BELLY SHIRT! Extra hot." - Drunk Weisman.Women are a real ball and CHAIN, amirite?Sassy bitch."Then Goliath will FACEPALM like they did on TNG! CRAZY CONNECTION!" "Sir, no one will get that joke until 2007..." "STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION" - Drunk Weisman and DD Lydia Marano.2728I love that pretty much everyone is extra dumb in this episode for absolutely no reason.Usually guys standing around in nothing but loincloths in a crowded subway either get arrested or get spare change.There's no way she didn't take a peek under that loincloth during the fall.I...I'm scared.ALL-TIME FAVORITE CHARACTER.4041424443I mean...this DOES look pretty bad.51525354"Gargoyle-on-Gargoyle chick fight. GARGOYLE-ON-GARGOYLE CHICK FIGHT." - Drunk Weisman"Then Gargoyle Elisa SHOOTS DEMONA with her BIG FUCKING GUN." - Drunk Weisman5561626364Was...that guy already not wearing shoes before he changed? Or did the entire city of Manhattan lose their shoes this night? If so, what a calamity.70Imma eat your hand nomnomnomThank god it's only...48 episodes of unresolved sexual tension to go."And then--get this--and then Demona ends up TURNING HUMAN DURING THE DAY. And it's like that FOR-FREAKING-EVER!" "But Greg, that's a massive plot twist to throw into a standalone episo--" "FOOOOOORRREEEEEEVVVVVVEEEEEEEERRRRRR"Precious Magic: “A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/precious-magic-a-lighthouse-in-the-sea-of-time/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/precious-magic-a-lighthouse-in-the-sea-of-time/#respondSun, 09 Feb 2014 14:09:13 +0000http://weliveagain.wordpress.com/?p=953Continue reading →]]>

Oh, great. It’s that dreaded “kids’ TV show tries to teach kids how important reading is even though this is still a TV show” episode. And this is on Gargoyles, whichis supposed to be an action show, to boot. Shakespeare references are cool and all, but can the show talk about how “reading is awesome!” without beating us over the head with it? Spoiler alert: it can’t. But that’s okay, because it says other stuff, too.

To be fair, the episode doesn’t open with a close-up on a book or something, and instead starts off with two indubitably British Indiana Jones archaeologist chaps exploring some cavernous ruins, like ya do.

High-risk archaeology is the key to a successful marriage.

It’s a magical cave, as evidenced by the pulsating lyre (um?) and a chest that reads, “The seeker of knowledge need fear nothing here. The destroyer, everything.” These two luckily are not the maniacal movie villain types of British, but are the brainy academic kind, meaning their faces don’t melt when they open the chest. Then MAGIC happens!

Translation: they have a rad rave.

Also, the face of God/Dumbledore/Gandalf/Whatever.

“Do or do not, there is no try.” – One of those guys.

Surprise! It’s Merlin, actually. In the Gargoyles universe, Merlin was a historical figure, presumably an actual wizard if those happen to exist (which we know do) and the contents of the chest were the scrolls he left behind.

Now, the implications of this are interesting. We’ve had a man named Macbeth appear in the show, and we’ve had characters parallel the story of Othello. But this is the first time that we’ve straight-up acknowledged that a fictional character is totally real in the Gargoyles universe. Merlin is considered a legitimate, actual person who lived by scientists. Yeah, there are historical origins for our version of Merlin, sort of, but for the most part anything we associate with the popularized Merlin myth purely fictional. In Gargoyles, the fictionalized Arthurian legend is history, and the science magazines Lex reads in the following scene explicitly name Merlin as a “5th century white wizard” that definitely existed and was alongside King Arthur.

NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERD

Presumably, “white wizard” is the debatable part of things, where historians perhaps believe it was a title even if they don’t believe in magic. But considering this is a universe where magic does exist, it’s pretty cool for the show to play around with the world’s history. As much as Gargoyles pretends that it’s “Gargoyles in our world!” it’s definitely got its own alternate history, and anytime the show embraces the differences is enlightening.

Elisa is tasked to protect the scrolls’ transport to the museum, prompting discussion within the clan. There’s some gratuitous shots of the smarter gargs reading various things while discussing how cool the scrolls are, which is meant to set a clear juxtaposition with Broadway and Hudson doing the most stereotypical Lazy American things in existence: eating and watching trashy reality TV. Hudson doesn’t pay much attention to the conversation because Celebrity Hockey is on, but oy vey does Broadway lay on the “I can’t read but reading is lame I’m too cool for school!” stuff, and it’s immediately kinda grating. We all know where this is going, don’t we?

Anyway, Elisa and Matt are with the Brits on the ship that’s transporting the scrolls. It’s dark and stormy, like it always freakin’ is on Gargoyles.

Also Elisa has a hat. Hi Elisa’s hat!

There’s brief discussion establishing that the scrolls might be magic spells (duh), succeeded by the arrival of a pair of jets blowing out the windows of the ship. The Gargoyles were following, luckily, and Lex references the kind of jets they are, which he read in a magazine. Again, Broadway mocks him because READING IS LAME even when it’s obviously providing helpful information, but whatever.

readin iz 4 lozerz lmao

The jets land, and a couple of brawny mercenary types break in and start shooting…electro…laser…gun…things? It’s 90s Gargoyles technology, so you know how that goes.

Necessary.

After some awkward tackling and junk (seriously…the animation makes the action kinda really weird) there’s a mildly funny gag between British lady and Buzzcut lady. “These scrolls are priceless!” British lady says. “Oh man, what was I thinkin’!” the mercenary says, holstering her gun. British lady totally buys it, and is actually relieved, and then the mercenary kung-fu kicks her down just to screw with her, I guess.

Also necessary.

After an air-fight sequence, Broadway attaches himself to one of the jets. The rest of the clan sees this, and assumes Hudson attached himself to the other escaping jet.

omg my clawz r lyke waaaay kewlr then bookz

Unbeknownst to them, though, is that Hudson has actually fallen unconscious into the water…but with one of the canisters!

Does the fact that he’s floating confirm that Gargoyles have a light bird-like bone density? Serious question.

The two mercenaries get back to their base, angry that they only got one canister. That is…until Broadway grabs the other one, which was stowed in the jet, and sneaks off.

lol im sneekin #shhh #selfie

His giant claw marks make it obvious what happened, though, so the two mercs go on the prowl.

What the hell is wrong with this dude’s eye?

Meanwhile, since Goliath pretty much blames everything wrong in the entire world on Xanatos, he busts into Xanatos’s castle. Owen is the only one there, and he’s just kinda smug and doesn’t really do or tell them anything.

“I am the reason for Jonathan Frakes to not have to do voicework today.”

In any case, the chase continues as the mercs catch up to Broadway.

YOUR EYE IS KILLING ME DUDE WHAT’S WRONG WITH IT

Broadway busts out of the complex, but the villain of the episode is revealed: it’s Macbeth. And he’s as awesome as he should have been in his awful introduction.

Stahp.

For real, though. “Enter Macbeth” was a total mess of an episode, but I don’t think I gave enough credit to how cool Macbeth still was as the enigmatic badass. He’s even cooler this time around, mostly because he can beat the Gargoyles hand-to-hand, partially because of his trenchcoat, and also because John Rhys-Davies is just, like, really good at everything.

Macbeth really wants the scrolls—not for their fiscal worth, but because of the spells. However, the one he has is the second compendium, and “it would be useless, even dangerous to read them out of order.”

Weren’t there like 10 scrolls in the chest at first? Why are there only two now…?

So, of course, the mercs are tasked with finding the first one.

Oh look and now YOUR EYE IS WORKING WHAT IS YOUR DEAL DUDE

Elsewhere, Hudson washes up on a beach, still holding the canister. A blind man and his seeing-eye dog stumble on Hudson, who asks for a place to rest until sunrise. The man introduces himself as Jeffrey Robbins.

Lean on meeeee

Meanwhile, Macbeth and the mercs travel in their jet, like, scouring the ocean to see if anything just-so-happens to be floating there, I guess. Macbeth also casually threatens to murder his two flunkies, so that’s cool.

Disney villains, amirite?

But enough messing around, because Jeffrey Robbins is hella interesting, and it’s time to get to know the guy. First of all, he’s voiced by Paul Winfield, whose monster of an IMDB page speaks for itself. But we learn that Robbins served in Vietnam, where he lost his sight to shrapnel in a heroic move, and was subsequently awarded a purple heart. Basically, he’s an alright dude. He’s also incredibly insightful; he’s able to figure out that Hudson was a soldier once just based on the tone of his voice, for example.

I just realized that Hudson was also (half) blinded in battle WHOA PARALLELS.

Since the war, Robbins became a novelist, or he was before he “dried up.” He shows Hudson both braille and text copies of one of his books, but Hudson retorts, “Bumps…scrawls…what’s the difference?” As has been suspected, Hudson can’t read.

“And here’s my Sherlock/Supernatural crossover slashfic!”

Even though Hudson and Broadway are on a similar arc here, they feel like they’re on two different shows. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that Broadway is going to learn that his obviously-ignorant remarks about reading being lame were wrong. The writing is on the wall from the start, and Broadway’s lesson is clearly aimed at the younger audience. That makes total sense, really; Broadway functions well as a cipher for the kids at home, in this case any kids who resemble Mike Teavee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Reading isn’t typically “cool” to the general 10-year-old population, even less-so in the pre-Harry Potter time. And to be honest, it’s a lot easier to passively absorb a TV show than get invested in a book series (speaking from experience.) So, yeah, it makes plenty of sense to have Broadway voice the naive opinion that reading just isn’t worth it (in his case replacing “television” with “having a superhero action star life.”) It’s just that he voices the most obnoxiously direct and aggressive version of that sentiment possible.

Hudson, on the other hand, voices the more mature side of it, and it’s clearly aimed at a completely different group of people. For one thing, Hudson is old, and he doesn’t show a distaste for reading so much as, well, shame. In fact, that’s pretty much exactly what he says down the line. It’s very different angle to look at illiteracy, especially considering most children don’t really have shame in the same sense that adults do.

Back on the jet, Macbeth talks fondly about Merlin, referencing him as a “single spectacle” that “turned a boy into the greatest king that’s ever been seen.” Macbeth, being a well-spoken guy, gives the most flowery, succinct description of Arthurian legend imaginable, prompting Broadway to remark, “You describe it like you were there.”

I CAN SEE THROUGH TIME

Macbeth laughs off his comment, telling him he obviously read about it. The way he says “I’m old, but not that old” suggests something more going on, but what’s important is that reading brought the people to life for Macbeth, who in turn brought them to life for Broadway. More on that later.

Back on the beach, Hudson reveals that he never told the clan he couldn’t read. Again, Broadway hammered it over everyone’s heads that he thinks reading is stupid; Hudson stayed silent, implying that his inability to read isn’t by choice. Robbins tells him, “It isn’t shameful to be illiterate, it’s only shameful to stay that way.” But before the conversation can go further, Hudson runs off and stones up in the daylight, leaving Robbins to think he “scared him off with his preaching,” the poor guy.

Nothing screams “nice, inviting mansion on the beach” like stone gargoyles on a solid wall.

Macbeth, who I guess has been flying around the ocean and walking up and down every beach in New York or something, shows up at Robbins’ door asking if he’s come across the canister or a “person” named Hudson. He uses the obviously-fake name Lennox Macduff, though, and Robbins immediately makes the Shakespeare connection. Also, his dog Ginny growls, so all signs are pointing to this Macduff dude being a bad guy. (By the way, Ginny is named after Gilgamesh, which is what the book Robbins shows Hudson is about…cool, right?!) Macbeth still comes across the Hudson-statue holding the canister, though, and he grabs it.

That night, Hudson wakes up and goes back to Robbins, who tells him about that Macduff visitor and how he knew the name had to be phony. They connect the dots to Macbeth together, and Robbins uses THE MAGICAL POWER OF THE PHONE BOOK THAT WILL NEVER BECOME OUTDATED to locate Macbeth’s address.

That’s it. That’s the episode.

Macbeth, meanwhile, is finding the safest way to open the scrolls, which somehow involves a molten lava pit.

“Safest”

Broadway is being held captive so Macbeth can try out some spells on him once the scrolls are open, FYI. The way we see Macbeth get the scrolls opened is pretty cool, with some complex mechanics used to melt off the seals.

However, it’s at this point that I wonder if Macbeth was the best choice for the villain. Like “The Long Way to Morning”, the choice of villain seems to be for convenience, giving us an established one so we don’t have to waste time crafting a new one. But, while this episode honestly does redeem Macbeth on the “coolness factor” side of things, his significance to the story is a bit disappointing. The problem is that, in his first appearance, he was firmly established to be mysteriously entrenched in the show’s evolving Mytharc. This episode is pretty much a complete standalone, so while Macbeth is really cool, any episode that doesn’t shed much light on his connection to the mythology—especially considering how mysterious he was in his first appearance—seems like a missed opportunity. Then again, more Davies is always a good thing, and it does get more Shakespeare references shoehorned in, so it’s not a total loss.

Hudson and the clan converge outside of Macbeth’s place, and bust in to save Broadway and the scrolls together. Apparently Macbeth only hired the two flunkies as guards, but he did apparently give them giant Gatling guns. During the mayhem, the scrolls burst open, and Macbeth frantically reads them. To his surprise, it’s simply Merlin’s diary, with the text telling of Merlin’s thoughts while training young Arthur.

Looks legit.

Goliath gets his hands on the scrolls and threatens to burn them as an ultimatum to get Broadway set free. Macbeth doesn’t care since they aren’t spells. Broadway, however, screams that “They’re magic! Precious magic!” because “It’s Merlin’s life, in his own words. When you read them, they take you there.”

Might as well burn it, Hollywood will just ruin it by making a shitty movie adaptation anyway.

I will say this one very important thing: Bill Fagerbakke delivers this part impeccably. The guy’s great. The lines themselves? Ehhhhhh. I’d be okay with Broadway declaring the written word “precious magic” if it was more justified. As it stands, he “learned his lesson” from literally one scene of Macbeth recapping Arthurian legend. Macbeth’s little speech there is very good, but it’s a pretty big cheat that some flowery language teaches Broadway to completely flip his mindset.

Yeah, time constraints and all that, but the haphazard way Broadway has a sudden realization sort of undermines that aspect of the episode. As cringe-worthy as Broadway’s declarations may be, his reasoning for appreciating literature is solid. I like Broadway attaining an appreciation of literature because of how it transports you to different worlds. That aspect of “reading is awesome” is good, and I’m glad the episode chose that side to focus on. But because the episode is split between Hudson and Broadway gaining appreciation, Broadway’s evolution to learning that lesson—which is more important than the lesson itself—is lost. It isn’t earned because his revelation comes from one scene, which is frustrating considering the whole point of these morality tales is to show the process of learning the lesson from multiple angles (see: “Deadly Force.”)

Anyway, Macbeth gives up on all this and asks The Gargoyles to leave, scroll and all. On the way back, Goliath offers to read the scrolls to Hudson and Broadway before they return them to the museum where they belong. Hudson surprises them, though, instead saying he will read them on his own, just as soon as he learns how.

Just kidding, he was only recapping the midseason finale of Scandal.

We get one last peek at Robbins, who decides to write a book about Merlin after hearing about the scrolls on the news. As he starts the creation of his story, he speaks the opening lines, referring to the written word as “Windows to the past, mirrors on the present, prisms reflecting all possible futures. Books are lighthouses erected in the dark sea of time.”

Ginny looks confused. No, not because of his book. She’s a dog and doesn’t understand English, moron.

To be honest, I keep wanting to be annoyed by any big morality episode. The end morals of some season one episodes tended to get in the way of good storytelling, but so far “Deadly Force” is the only other one that used a big moral as its entire basis. That episode worked because the moral was rare to see on a cartoon and was handled with much maturity. “A Lighthouse in the Sea of Time” is about reading, of all things. It’s a moral made for children, and it’s one we already learned from Sesame Street. And it’s showing up in our complex action cartoon?!

And yet…it fits, doesn’t it? I mean, this episode throws in references to Shakespeare, Arthurian Legend, Gilgamesh…this whole show does that, in fact. It’d actually be disingenuous to bring up the fact that much of the show’s background is based on the written word. So I guess, while Broadway’s little arc is kind of annoying and isn’t played out too well, it’s justified that it exists. Hudson’s story, on the other hand, is the episode’s highlight. Robbins is an instantly likeable and memorable character, and focusing on Hudson’s shame at not being able to do something everyone else expects he can is especially relevant. We’ve seen Hudson’s feelings of inadequacy on display before, so this plays into his character in the long term.

But then, aren’t we still missing the point?

I’d like to think it’s not a coincidence that Jeffrey Robbins, our main mouthpiece for the importance of literature introduced here, is African-American. He’s a sophisticated and accomplished author, and he’s a war hero, and he’s still independent in spite of his disability. Since he was in Vietnam, that meant he was around during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which means he’s lived through some of the most volatile racism of the last 60 years in America. It could be a coincidence—they could have very well decided on the character’s race after Winfield’s casting—but I’d like to think Weisman & Co. are usually pretty aware of what they’re doing. I say that because, though the show doesn’t address this directly, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that a higher percentage of illiterate, low-income people in America are statistically people of color. So it’s fitting that it’s a black man who tells the uneducated viewers (kids and adults) that, no, it’s not your fault that you didn’t have the opportunities for education that your more privileged peers did. But you are always responsible for how you can change, even in the smallest of ways, and taking the initiative to learn and get that education is the first step to improving your life.

It’s not really Hudson’s fault he can’t read, because his circumstances (the time period, his age, his race, etc.) didn’t allow him the opportunity. Hudson and Broadway have both faced some pretty awful things, and to an extent have used them to justify their own ignorance (shame in Hudson’s case, stubbornness in Broadway’s.) Robbins is a black man from the 60s who lost his sight in a war and had to completely relearn how to read and function. None of them had everything handed to them. But they all take initiative to do something more and be someone better, in spite of the rest of the world seemingly telling them they aren’t worth it. The lesson of the episode isn’t so much about how reading is awesome, even though that’s thrown out there for the younger folks. It’s about shedding your predispositions for the sake of self-improvement, and moving forward in spite of your circumstances.

It’s not books that are the true precious magic, it’s your ability to read them. They might be the lighthouse in the sea of time, but it’s up to you, the reader, to steer the ship that the light is guiding. Now get out there and start sailing.

Next time: Literature strikes back.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/precious-magic-a-lighthouse-in-the-sea-of-time/feed/030durkinator2730High-risk archaeology is the key to a successful marriage. It turns it into a pretty rad rave.4NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEERDAlso Elisa has a hat. Hi Elisa's hat!readin iz 4 lozerz lmao10Also necessary.omg my clawz r lyke waaaay kewlr then bookz16What the hell is wrong with this dude's eye?21YOUR EYE IS KILLING ME DUDE WHAT'S WRONG WITH IT25Weren't there like 10 scrolls in the chest at first?Oh look and now YOUR EYE IS WORKINGDisney villains, amirite?31"And this is my erotic Sherlock/Supernatural crossover fanfic!"I CAN SEE THROUGH TIMENothing screams "nice, inviting mansion on the beach" like stone gargoyles on a solid wall.That's it. That's the episode.41Looks accurate.Might as well burn it, Hollywood will just ruin it by making a shitty movie adaptation anyway.Just kidding, he was just talking about the midseason finale of Scandal.The dog isn't terribly impressed.United For All Time: “Legion”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/united-for-all-time-legion/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/united-for-all-time-legion/#respondSun, 26 Jan 2014 02:54:42 +0000http://weliveagain.wordpress.com/?p=898Continue reading →]]>

Shakespeare. Cyborgs. Virtual reality. Colorful video game outfits. Lovecraftian horrors. A love story. Our favorite Frankenstein-Worf Gargoyle, Coldstone, returns in the trippiest, most “EXTREME 90s” episode of Gargoyles thus far. It would probably be terrible if it were any show but this one.

We open under the water, where we hear what’s since become Coldstone’s musical motif (a very cool one) and see his body buried.

Darling it’s better down where it’s wetter

We get a peek into his head, which leads to a fairly trippy sequence—circuits firing, followed by seemingly random images with weird backgrounds. It’s much less grounded than anything we’ve seen on the show thus far (and this is on a show with flying, talking man-bats.) A voice “initiates new program parameters,” and we see a series of intriguing images of Coldstone macking on a lady gargoyle and subsequently fighting over her with Goliath.

OH NO HE DI-IN’T

There’s also some creepy gargoyle egging Coldstone on in the jealous-rage stuff.

He wants you all to himself.

So…uh…yeah. There’s that. The beneficial thing about this, other than immediately setting the stage for a very weird episode, is that we get a pretty cool view into the gargoyles as a society within themselves. For all this talk about clans, we’ve never seen too much outside of the gargoyle relationship with humans and their castle. We’ve seen them interact with one another about as literally as you’d expect brothers to interact, but outside of Goliath and Demona’s weird relationship, we’ve seen very little of less-familial relationships. They’re an entire species after all, equipped with the same mental capacity as humans. There’s no way they’d all behave like big, happy families all the time.

In any case, it’s a strange way to open a strange episode, even stranger by the place Robot!Coldstone breaks into.

SCIENCE!

It’s a military research facility that’s housed in, like, a warehouse or something. It also doesn’t have any semblance of order, what with scientists haphazardly experimenting on themselves in obviously not sterile environments. None of it matters, though, since it’s all blown up by a robot gargoyle on a mission to stab computer ports with a switchblade.

Why are we using flashdrives when we could just be using FUCKING WRIST DAGGERS?!

Shoving a piece of metal into an electrical device will surely cause the electrocution shown here, but the unexpected result is that it somehow brings Coldstone out of his robotic trance, with no memory of where he is.

Also, more acid trip.

Meanwhile, Elisa and Lex fangirl over this device called RECAP that stands for something nonsensical. It’s a new device police are using, “robotics technology linked with virtual reality.” Virtual Reality. Uh-oh. Those words should stand out to anyone who paid attention to pop culture—particularly sci-fi and comics—in the 90s.

“This headset will be perfect for people to hear my homophobic and racist slurs over Xbox Live!”

A bit of context: technology was booming in this weird, exciting-but-confusing way in the 90s. I mean, that’s when most of us got the internet in our libraries and homes. Think about what that means: there was a time when we had to make it a point to get the internet because we didn’t have it yet and never had it before. The advent of that, alongside the first major uses of things like, say, polygons in video games (“they look so real!” we said), movies and shows made technology seem so alien yet so close to home. You knew all this stuff existed, but you had no idea how it worked or what it did. So while we’d get some pretty great things that did a lot with the “technology is magic” concept, like Reboot for example, we’d also get things where technology turns people into psychos or is hilariously and nonsensically misused (just the first minute of that video.) More specifically, you get buzzwords like “Virtual Reality,” which end up losing all meaning and get thrown in when tech speak is needed, even when it has no use being there. Virtual reality isn’t a very hard concept to crack, but boy howdy did people somehow not understand what the heck it was.

The reason I bring this up is because the stuff in “Legion” needs some of that context. Because, while the science in “Metamorphosis” wasn’t exactly accurate, it at least stayed vague and was kept in the background. We’re going to be seeing how super cool new 90s technology can do everything in this episode, but if you can ignore that aspect, there’s plenty to still look at. Not that I won’t still laugh at it mercilessly.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Since there’s a monster attacking a highly-armed military facility (which is IN THE MIDDLE OF MANHATTAN?!?!) the police are using RECAP to check it out. Which pretty much involves an adorable R/C Roomba that resembles one of the lamer parts of a subpar Sliders episode.

Also, instead of having, like, a video camera, RECAP uses EXTREME VIRTUAL REALITY, so the viewer sees life through a Terminator’s eyes.

This thing is definitely going to turn on its makers.

Coldstone wanders around the facility, now just trying to get out, and is totally confused as to why he’s being shot at by the guards. “Why did you bring me here just to attack me!” he yells, in a brilliant line reading from Michael Dorn. His “What the fuck is going on?!” reaction is only amplified when he encounters RECAP, which even has weapons and tear gas attached to it, meaning it will definitely take over the world eventually. Coldstone blows it up, which somehow makes Matt—who is, you know, merely watching a video broadcast through a visor—yelp in pain and throw the expensive machine recklessly on the ground.

EXTREEEEEEME VIRTUAL REALITY

Coldstone busts out, but Goliath and Lex arrive just in time, as per usual. After some ol’ fashioned wrasslin’, they remind Coldstone that they’re on the same side, offer to let him join their clan, and it’s all puppies and rainbows.

I had a dream like this once.

It’s a bit refreshing, actually, that Coldstone isn’t shoehorned into being a villain yet again. They all (presumably) resolved their issues back in his first appearance, so it would be silly to not have him side with him. And it’s a pretty cool reunion, as we learn he had a connection with more than just Goliath; Hudson was his mentor, too, for example. Again, after having been so squarely focused on this clan, it’s nice to hear that these guys are only the last of their kind by luck; there were plenty of others that they were close to that fell in the slaughter.

“There is only one other I miss more,” Coldstone says, before he freezes and his eye starts beeping.

DANGER WILL ROBINSON

He reboots, now sporting a higher, more effeminate voice that doesn’t recognize where he is. He’s also confused as to why Goliath calls him “brother,” and lets out a perfectly girlish scream upon looking in the mirror.

Macaulay Culkin’s got nothing on you, girl.

I like that this isn’t played for laughs. Not that it’s terribly obvious what’s going on yet, but…well, you can probably figure out that there’s a female that’s taken over the body. It’d be easy to try to spin this as awkwardly funny, but Gargoyles has never been that kind of show. Dorn’s brief performance in this state is strikingly good; there’s not much to it, really, it’s just soft enough without feeling exaggerated or like a parody. It’s actually pretty easy to sense the horror of the reveal here, and even plays better than Coldstone’s initial reveal back in “Reawakening.”

After this version of Coldstone escapes…again…Goliath and Hudson chase her down, where a reboot happens yet again. This time, the Coldstone that emerges is darker, obviously evil, and again presented with a subtle-yet-effective change of voice from Dorn. And so, since this gargoyle is evil, apparently, a fight breaks out.

I NEED AN ADULT

Elisa contacts the clan with some exposition: the government mainframe Coldstone stabbed had quite a few secrets in it, and they were protected by a powerful new computer virus capable of infecting and totally deleting any program that illegally accesses it. The government in the Gargoyles universe is apparently way more effective than the government now at technology (cue ACA website jokes) because the virus is even capable of infecting a mainframe as complex as Coldstone, giving him the virus.

It also gives him acid trips, as we previously figured out.

Coldstone is going progressively crazier, freaking out because of the multiple voices in his head and shooting everything everywhere. Luckily, the Trio shows up and knocks him unconscious.

I probably had a dream like this once, too.

Lex just-so-happens to have the exact plug that will fit into Coldstone’s…neck port? Which he apparently has now?

I dunno, that’s a little invasive if you ask me.

See why I said to ignore the technology parts of this? “If we want to save him, someone will have to go inside,” Lex says. The plan is to use the VR aspect of RECAP—which apparently does do more than just broadcast video—to go inside the “virtual reality” of Coldstone’s head. Yay for convenience! Goliath offers to go in, needing Lex to stay and monitor the equipment, and also because he doesn’t comprehend how much of a dork he’s going to look like with RECAP on.

I agree, Lex. I agree.

Luckily, all this VR BS paves the way for the truly cool aspect of the episode: the inside of Coldstone’s head.

BRAIN TAPEWORMS

Also, Goliath’s confuddled reaction.

Confuddled incarnate.

VR Goliath crosses a bridge to get to Castle Wyvern, atop which are three stone gargoyles. Then, Xanatos appears in what must be the most fabulous extreme videogame outfit I’ve ever laid eyes on.

This episode is so perfect in the worst ways.

“Surely you didn’t expect to explore Coldstone’s mind without my permission,” Fabulous Extreme Videogame Xanatos says. As a computer program, FEVX’s main directive is to enslave Coldstone to follow Xanatos’s will (hence the Robot!Coldstone invading a government facility at the beginning) but the computer virus is instead devouring the whole place.

One thing to say about this section of the episode is that, even beyond the mindscrewy background designs, the direction is absolutely dynamic. The camera angles are constantly moving and zooming, further enhancing the disorienting effect of Coldstone’s broken, part magic/part computer mind. The dynamic camerawork shown here is hard to pull off in animation, especially during this time, so to see it used to extensively is a real delight.

The stone gargoyles awaken, and the lone female tells Goliath that, since Coldstone was made from pieces of different gargoyles, all their souls are trapped there.

I love her weirdly specific hand gestures.

This is a very heady concept. Not heady in the sense that it’s complicated, but in that this show is openly confirming the existence of souls as the essence of a being. It’s not really even treated as a big deal, it’s just another part of life. “Oh, duh, of course their souls would be trapped in that gargoyle’s body if they used different pieces.” It makes sense that the gargoyle characters would accept this considering the time period they’re from, but for the show itself to not shy away from embracing a concept so deeply entrenched in spiritual belief is kind of awesome. In the context of this magical world, it makes sense.

It’s also a distinctive spin on a character that was previously just an homage to Frankenstein. Not that this episode isn’t still a homage to something, it turns out. Even though we got a character named Macbeth in season one, “Legion” is the first time we have a plot that directly alludes to Shakespeare’s works, Othello in this case. The Bard himself isn’t even namedropped, it’s merely up to us to pick up on it, an example of the literary fun we’re going to have later on in the show. But essentially, Coldstone (Othello) is manipulated by the sneaky gargoyle (Iago) into thinking that his lover (Desdemona) is having an affair with Goliath (Cassio). It’s in broad strokes, and Coldstone goes after Goliath directly instead of (spoiler alert) Othello ruining Cassio’s reputation and totally murdering Desdemona, but the story is familiar enough that it functions as an added bit of color. The imagery is reminiscent of common depictions of the characters and some scenes, not to mention that Coldstone’s voice actor is African-American.

Not sure who Xanatos is supposed to be, though. Emilia, maybe?

We could have easily just had one gargoyle be “bad” and have him attack the rest, but the extra layer of dredging up past tiffs amplifies the chaos and gives more life to Coldstone as a character. It’s actually much easier to believe his immediate anger at Goliath in his first appearance, since he already had trust issues with Goliath from before. It might be a bit superfluous in a storytelling sense, but it’s more interesting seeing this play out than much of the pro-technology stuff was in the early parts of the episode. Also, Shakespeare is awesome, so yeah.

Meanwhile, Matt gets PISSED that RECAP was stolen, turns on a homing beacon, and calls in a SWAT TEAM to take down the thief on Ellis Island. Lex tries to pull Goliath out of the VR, but it electrocutes him…because, I dunno, sorcery or whatever.

EXTREEEEEEME VIRTUAL REALITY

In VR world, the female gargoyle is way more proactive than Shakespeare’s Desdemona, as she manages to break up the Coldstone/Goliath fight and convince Coldstone to “trust his heart.”

All this while hanging from a cliff, too. EXTREEEEEEME VIRTUAL REALITY.

Realizing that it was the Iago gargoyle that set him against his friends, Coldstone chooses the good side, and the three set off to take down the enemy. However, they’re stopped when Xanatos and Iago-garg merge into a giant Fabulous Extreme Videogame entity.

EXTREEEEE–okay, I’ll stop.

Meanwhile, Hudson, Broadway and Brooklyn take down the SWAT team in secret, by slowly bringing down helicopters and breaking the boats’ rudders, 100% ruining Matt’s day.

“Ain’t I a stinker?”

In VR world again, the videogame boss offers the lady gargoyle to merge with them and take over Coldstone’s body, but she badassly responds, “I will choose who I love!” before biting him, which is awesome. In the mayhem, the tapeworm virus grabs our big bad boss and drags him into the vortex, presumably deleting both the evil gargoyle and the Xanatos program.

I might have had a dream like this, too.

Goliath wants to help the two gargoyles, but they want him to escape. “We are finally together, that is all that matters,” they say. “If we can stop the virus, so be it. If we fail, we can still be united for all time.” Which…whoa. We’re back to the “Gargoyles lose everything all the time” resolution, but it’s a little different this time. The heroes are choosing the lesser of two evils, deciding to earn their sort-of happiness at the risk of complete desolation, or more likely, losing their other half. It’s not particularly selfless or heroic, really, but considering they were unfairly trapped in a hellish, crumbling virtual plane with an Eldritch abomination threatening their very existence, they deserve a little happiness.

“ANYTHING’S better than being single, amirite?”

Goliath runs on all fours to get to the exit, making it out just in time for our heroes to clear out before Matt’s SWAT time finally makes it.

You’re not gonna even entertain the possibility that the rat is shapeshifter?

We shoot over to Xanatos, where Owen “returns” RECAP…which was apparently just on loan to the police from Xanatos himself. In true Xanatos fashion, he knew he could either a) get the defense specs from Coldstone; b) get defense specs from RECAP after it intercepted Coldstone; or c) get a super powerful computer virus from RECAP by way of Coldstone. This is a much better example of a Xanatos gambit than last week’s unnecessarily complicated mess, one which showcases Xanatos’s ability to get a win out of every angle no matter what rather than just, well, make complicated plans.

David Xanatos doesn’t watch porn. Porn watches David Xanatos.

In closing, Goliath leaves Coldstone’s comatose body in their tower, in hopes that he will one day wake up among friends. The virus tears through his mind, but the two gargoyles in love remain together.

Worst. Honeymoon. Ever.

“Legion” feels weirdly run-of-the-mill at times, even though it’s a very dynamic episode, visually. The inside of Coldstone’s brain really does look cool, and while the animation and art isn’t at its peak, the creepy clouds, virtual plane and creepy tentacles are used to great effect to make up for it. What sets the episode back is that it follows two episodes that drastically changed the status quo, even if in small ways–Xanatos and Fox getting together, and Derek turning into a mutant. We don’t really get much of a “wow” factor or emotional resonance here, especially since the love story comes into play so quickly that we don’t quite get to latch onto it with everything else happening.

Even at that, though, it’s notable for how hard it tries. That sounds like an empty compliment, but I mean that in the best possible way. There are genuine pathos in the Othello-inspired story unfolding in Coldstone’s head, and is more entertaining for that extra layer than another good guy vs. bad guy story. But between the extensive introduction of the new technology and just getting around the headier concepts of Coldstone’s…well…head, the love story doesn’t quite have enough time to yield the emotional reaction its conclusion should. But the effort is appreciated, and while “Legion” doesn’t always spend enough time on the right things, it does make Coldstone much more interesting than he was in his first appearance.

It still doesn’t make VR seem as cool as the 90s wanted it to be, though.

Next week: Reading is FUNducational.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/25/united-for-all-time-legion/feed/049durkinator2749176SCIENCE!1011Also, more acid trip.9HAHAHAHA OMGWhoa, hey there random bit of continuity!This thing is definitely going to turn on its makers.EXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEME VIRTUAL REAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALITY1719Macaulay Culkin's got nothing on you, girl.I NEED AN ADULTIt also gives him acid trips.27I dunno, that's a little invasive if you ask me.I agree, Lex. I agree.BRAIN TAPEWORMS31This episode is perfect in the worst ways.I love her weirdly specific hand gestures.Not sure who Xanatos is supposed to be, though. Emilia, maybe?37All this while hanging from a cliff, too. EXTREEEEEEME VIRTUAL REALITY.EXTREEEEE--okay, I'll stop."Ain't I a stinker?"I might have had a dream like this, too."ANYTHING'S better than being single, amirite?"You're not gonna even entertain the possibility that that rat is shapeshifter?David Xanatos doesn't watch porn. Porn watches David Xanatos.Worst. Honeymoon. Ever.I Was Fooling Myself: “Metamorphosis”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/i-was-fooling-myself-metamorphosis-2/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/i-was-fooling-myself-metamorphosis-2/#commentsFri, 17 Jan 2014 02:31:27 +0000http://weliveagain.wordpress.com/?p=856Continue reading →]]>

Remember that time you and your sibling had that falling out? Chances are, if you have a close relationship, you probably managed to work it out. You might not have gotten your brother/sister to see your side of things, but you still found ways to tolerate, forgive and ultimately enjoy each other’s company again. Love conquers all, and unconditional familial love is a very special, powerful type of love, right? Yeah, tell that to David Xanatos.

The episode opens with the most cheerful of settings: a dreary back alley with the homeless. A young woman says she “isn’t like them” and this is just a mild setback, implying she’s probably some musician or actress who ran away from home to New York and fell flat on her face. A creepy old British man in a trenchcoat, the likes of which always happen to hang out in dark alleys, escorts her away with a job offer as a “temporary assistant.”

Already, this episode is different. I’m exaggerating a bit on creepiness factor—it doesn’t play that bad, to be honest—but this type of opening is pulled out of Batman far more than Gargoyles as we’ve come to know it. Outside of “Temptation”, we haven’t seen much of the seedy underbelly of Manhattan; there are good guys and bad guys, but the first season skidded over the people in need that aren’t yuppie couples or shopkeeps. It’s the kind of scene that would open a horror movie.

And like any good horror movie, we’re also introduced to our plucky female protagonist, who delivers the best worst joke imaginable: “You know what the zen master said to the hot dog vendor? ‘Make me one with everything!'”

So he gives her an “everything” hot dog with JUST MUSTARD in vengeance.

She’s visiting Derek, who’s doing backflips in a plane, like ya do.

Da fuq kinda plane is that?

Like Elisa has the tendency to do with her brother, she chastises him for missing dinner and blames it all on his job with Xanatos. She still tries to hearken back to the “lead your own life” mantra, but is so passive-aggressive about it that it only makes Derek all the more annoyed. “Xanatos isn’t the reincarnation of Snidely Whiplash,” he says.

“Derek, what normal children in our demographic would even GET that reference?”

They also do a little “cross your heart and hope to die” thing, which isn’t Checkov’s gun or anything. But it’s cute, and shows that, even though they both think the other is a crazy blockhead, they still have a close relationship.

Meanwhile, The Gargoyles wake up and stones fall on people. Nothing to see here, folks.

It doesn’t take long to get to the meat of the episode, though, don’t worry. In fact, from here on out things happen and we power through to the end. It’s about the quickest the momentum has started in an episode, and it’s much appreciated. Especially given how the way the momentum starts is a cat-bat-lady beast breaking out of a dimly-lit facility and tearing through a bunch of angry scientists.

Why can’t I…hold all this cat creature?

It’s already plenty apparent what’s going on here, if you’ve seen any sci-fi. But thus far in the series, we’ve been introduced to our villains in obvious ways. There have been bait-and-switches here and there for Xanatos and Demona, but for the most part the villains-of-the-week make their entrances as bad guys out to do bad, or ambiguous guys used as tools to do bad. There’s a whole extra story thread happening here that, as of yet, has nothing to do with The Gargoyles. It’s both intriguing, and a little disconcerting.

Aw, she made a heart with her food! She thinks she’s people!

Meanwhile, Brooklyn and Broadway are gliding around the city when they spot a winged shadow in an alley. They think it might be Demona, to which Brooklyn has a bit of brief crazy rage, a nice moment for of continuity for him. To their surprise, it’s not her, but a gargoyle-like creature they’ve never seen.

Well, she does hide in the shadows about as poorly as Demona.

They try to talk to her, but she freaks out at the sight of these scary monsters. Brooklyn is immediately enamored, because he’s a suave bachelor who digs chicks who are scared of him. A couple of big vans (with sirens?!) pull up, and a handful of mercenaries spill out. “Tranq them all, let the doc sort them out!” one yells, which is hilarious.

EYE SCREAM

If you recognize the voice (the versatile Kath Soucie) from earlier, you can probably put together who this cat lady is and what’s going on. What’s unexpected is how throwing in actual gargoyle monsters subverts the horror movie cliches. Suddenly the victim is running back to the people she’s escaping from, which is both funny and freaky at the same time. Brooklyn gets hit with a tranq before he can rescue/kidnap her, so Broadway gets them out of there while cat lady is dragged away.

WHAT KIND OF TRANQS DO THAT?!?!

They report back to the clan, and Brooklyn reveals that he is totally infatuated. Because the true test of love is whether or not she’ll tell you to your face that you’re a hideous monster, right bro?

…Too easy.

Broadway pulls out a “Gen-U-Tech” bracelet that fell off the cat lady, which Elisa identifies as a hi-tech and expensive tracker. You know, one that loosely fits on the hand of the escaping creature and has the company logo proudly displayed to mark the secret illegal experiments.

Good god her wrist must be HUGE.

Elisa identifies Gen-U-Tech as a Xanatos-funded company, which we aaaallllll know they’re going to investigate and prod Xanatos about. Meanwhile, Xanatos gets a call about his funds being used to hire mercenaries. Derek overhears and joins him on this little venture to investigate, since pilot/bodyguard is what he was hired to do in the first place. I have to admit, I quite like Derek in this episode, even more than usual. He’s level-headed, he’s committed to doing his job, and it seems like he does it pretty darn well. Xanatos also seems like an okay dude, so again, it really feels like Derek is in the right with all the Snidely Whiplash stuff.

They meet Dr. Sevarius, the creepy British man from earlier, at Gen-U-Tech. In case we hadn’t figured it out before, it becomes obvious that this is Tim-fucking-Curry, and suddenly the intrigue is all the higher. Xanatos asks for a breakdown of what Sevarius was being funded to do for plot exposition purposes, and thus we learn this episode’s plot: he was tasked with making a homemade gargoyle from scratch.

“They’d have to eat a total of three cows a day to retain energy, which explains pretty much everything about this one.”

So, one thing I really really like with “Metamorphosis” is the science. I mean—okay, let me back up, because this is still Disney Comic Book Science. Gene splicing is pretty much the catch-all for “science-y biology stuff”, but there’s still clearly a decent amount of thought put into how this could be feasible in the Gargoyles world.

Science, amirite?

Jungle cat ferocity plus a bat’s ability to fly. The explanation of gargoyles storing solar energy during their stone sleep. The ingenious use of electric eels’ “electroreceptors” in place of it. This is really cool stuff! It’s 90s technobabble at its finest, but Gargoyles has the obvious advantage of being a children’s fantasy show. It doesn’t really need to try to make sense half the time, but that it does anyway ought to garner quite a lot of respect. It’s a little more level than average comic book science—no gamma or cosmic radiation or whatever—just things that already exist and theories that are common knowledge, and it’s used vaguely enough that you can buy it. This is a very smart episode of the show, not just because of these details, but also for the character details and reactions we see unfold. Particularly when Sevarius reveals his babies…

All they need now are mates. Wink wink nudge nudge?

It dawns on Xanatos very quickly that there’s no way creatures could be grown from scratch so quickly, and he deduces that they were made from humans. Sevarius confirms that they were human test subjects injected with a mutagenic formula, which rightfully pisses Derek off (who’s been surprisingly content with this thus far.)

“Why are my ears already as pointy as his?!”

“I was fooling myself, I know Sevarius has a bad reputation,” Xanatos says. This scene is good. Xanatos is straight-up noble for the first time in the history of the series, and in the context of this scene alone, it could be argued that Derek’s goodness has rubbed off on him. Xanatos has every intention of going down with Sevarius. We’ll get to the validity of all this later on, but for the time being, Sevarius up and shoots Derek with a dart full of mutagen, which is actually a solid shocker. It’s inevitable, and is exactly where this was all leading, but the sudden twist is well-done.

Meanwhile, The Gargoyles are breaking into Gen-U-Tech to find their cat friend. In addition to the well-written scene before, this entire sequence following is also very engaging. Again, everyone is just smart. Goliath goes in with a plan (well, supposedly, he says.) Lex notices the wires to the alarm.

I just see window panes, but I’ll trust your judgement.

But they’re using they’re heads and not just bursting in, which is a far cry from their siege back in “Awakening, Part Four.” Or really any episode in the first season for that matter. Lex even uses a computer to help them get in, which shows just how much his technological ability has evolved as of late.

That’s some killer binary there. On a blood red screen.

I also like how Goliath uses a combination of blunt force and his claws to get through the glass of the cat-lady’s prison, too. Again, there’s a lot of detail in this episode that makes everyone look good.

Nailed it. HAHA GET IT?

Of course, cat lady is kind of obnoxious and sounds the alarm, because she can’t see how these TOTAL STUDS are into her.

I mean, right?!

The “villain origin story” part of this becomes clear when we check back in with Derek, who’s in the midst of his obviously painful and not-really-that-attractive transformation. The Gargoyles bust in to threaten Xanatos, totally ignoring the medical procedure happening in front of their faces, and in the midst of the chaos the antidote is shattered.

FIVE SECOND RULE?!

But Sevarius can just make another one, right?

Oh…

…shit.

So, it’s not really surprising to say this is a massive turning point here. People have died on this show before—lots of them, actually. But, insensitive as it is to say, it’s easier to kill off a big group of people like the original gargoyle clan and not feel it sink in your gut. They aren’t specific persons; they were a group, a personality-less amalgam that gets shattered offscreen. And all those bad guys getting thrown off cliffs? Whatever. I mean who hasn’t in Disney cartoons, right? But Sevarius is kicked into a tank, falls into a pile of glass and is electrocuted in-full onscreen. To death. This isn’t anywhere near as chilling as when Elisa was shot (nothing really ever will be on this show), but holy shit! The animation in this episode kind of sucks, and it’s silly that he seems to purposefully grab the eel that kills him, but even with those things holding it back? It’s still frightening.

And then it sets in that Derek is now out of options. This show is cynical, it always has been. But there’s a difference between the grandiose cynicism that followed Goliath’s relentless journey, and just totally shitty and unfair luck for Derek. At least Goliath knew he was involved in some intense stuff and was in the middle of a war. Derek is oblivious half the time, and when he’s not he gets royally screwed over just because he happens to be there. And he only happens to be there because he’s a decent pilot and his sister is friends with some superheroes. It’s the ultimate nightmare for a superhero’s friend or family to suffer because of their superheroing, but with Derek we have a unique position of seeing it all from his perspective. And from his perspective…the universe is just mad at him, apparently.

We find out that the (now kind of really annoying) cat lady is Maggie Reed from Ohio. “I need a cure! I’m not a monster!” she says to the attractive monsters who’ve been super nice to her. Though, they’re also really snarly all the time, so that definitely has something to do with her freak-out.

“How’s my breath?”

Naturally, Maggie runs away the second they turn to stone, which they all pretty much expected. Goliath swears he’ll confront Xanatos now that they know for sure he was involved in the consent-less mutation, “Even if it means confronting Xanatos at his castle.” Because…that’s been a problem before?

Maggie returns to Xanatos and the cat people, who test out their wings per Xanatos’s permission. Derek is now in full-cat form, and immediately takes on sort of a leadership role to this group of ragtag genetic misfits.

Swat Kats: The Radical Squadron

The Gargoyles arrive, and a fight breaks out immediately, thanks to Derek’s (pretty justified) anger towards him. Maggie, meanwhile, thinks they want her to stay a monster, which is why she fights back even though they’ve been nothing but nice. Also, it turns out they can shoot electricity from their hands, because why not?

“What a SHOCKER!” – Another reason why I’m not a successful screenwriter.

Elisa arrives to help The Gargoyles, assuring the cat people that Goliath would never intentionally hurt anyone. Derek doesn’t immediately reveal his identity, instead asking her to call him “Talon”, which…yeah, sorry, it’s totally out of character and totally stupid. I’m not even giving this a pass for it being a cartoon. That name is stupid, and that Derek decides to suddenly pull it out now is stupid. GRANTED, I do see a sort of purposeful symbolism, where this represents Derek embracing his new form as a cat-warrior on a revenge kick. I don’t mind that idea, and giving himself a silly name would be justified for that. But now’s not the time. He hasn’t crossed into acceptance yet.

“Call me…Fingernails. Paws? Talon’s good.”

Anyway, Elisa, who’s really awesome in this scenario for being the only peacemaker, pleads that she just wants to help. “Promise?” Talon says. “Cross my heart,” Elisa responds. “And hope to–” “Derek?!”

I loooooove this. Love. The cross your heart thing is silly and was shoehorned in earlier, yeah. I wish there’d been a smoother way to reveal Derek’s identity. But the way this is executed is perfect. The voice-acting in this entire episode is phenomenal, and since Derek’s introduction Salli Richardson-Whitfield and Rocky Carroll have played off one-another impeccably well. Carroll himself steals the show this week, even moreso than legendary scene-stealer Tim Curry. His transformation from Derek to the gruffer Talon is subtle but effective, and he has a hell of a time with Derek’s transformation. That makes it all the more tragic, too, because Carroll makes him such an instantly likeable character.

It’s even worse when he electrocutes Elisa by accident. It’s a lot of typical “I’m a monster!” fare, don’t get me wrong. But the introduction of Derek in “My Brother’s Keeper” provided enough emotional foundation that it resonates when Elisa loses the one human she was closest to.

Look at that face! Again, I’m pretty mad at how lame the artwork and animation is this week, but they nail it when they need to. We don’t get any resolution either; Derek/Talon lets out a Goliath-esque yell, and the mutants take off. Brooklyn is hit hard by the rejection of Maggie. Elisa declares war on Xanatos. Shit has gotten real. The stakes on this show have always been markedly high, but we’re really getting a level of emotional stakes that hadn’t been achieved yet. We know these characters now, and they aren’t just getting pissed off at broad moral incongruities or swearing revenge on mean villains. They’re having their hearts ripped out.

And then? Sevarius shows up in Xanatos’s office, having shed what was apparently old-man make-up the whole time.

I guess the crew cut is a LITTLE better than the Bride of Frankenstein hair.

So…yeah. Apparently the show pulled a Prestige before that movie existed, as Sevarius has been living this old, decrepit man persona for…well…a long time, right? It was during this entire process, also in public, maybe even longer. I mean, it shows that he must be some kind of sociopath to be willing to do that just for…well…a weirdly unnecessary Xanatos Gambit. They forced the subjects to escape so The Gargoyles would attack and cause Derek to turn into a monster so he’d have an enemy. Since Derek is convinced that only Xanatos can save him, it’ll keep him right where Xanatos wants him. Yeah.

I normally like these bait-and-switches for Xanatos, and we all dig Xanatos Gambits. But at a certain point, there’s a limit to how deviously complex the plan can to be, and this one is particularly screwy for how unnecessary the Sevarius disguise or Derek angle is. That said, there’s a brilliance to just how much sense it makes—why that Gen-U-Tech bracelet was so obvious, why Xanatos was suddenly so noble, why Sevarius purposefully grabbed an electric eel, how Xanatos could have skimmed over Sevarius’s deeds despite being a total micromanager. There was a lot of thought put into the crafting of this episode, and that’s one of the reasons it’s so good. It’s smart.

But the downside is that this plan also negates some of the kafkaesque horror of the story by complicating it, which is a shame. I’m not just saying that because of the titular metamorphosis; it’s surreal, bad things happening to good people for no good reason, with no logical way out. Everyone is smart and even rational, and yet everyone still makes the wrong decision. It’s horrible, but it’s also beautiful in just how well this tragic tale is spun. This might be the darkest story the show has thrown out, which is saying a lot considering how the opening episodes went. The body horror is presented better than in “Reawakening”, and the idea of losing consent to what happens to your body is adult fear #1.

The episode ends with everyone depressed and Elisa sobbing. And guess what?

She’s alone. Remember last season? It’s not a coincidence. Elisa is the odd human woman out. As much as they might be a clan right now, Elisa is still different. The Gargoyles are brothers, they understand each other, and they’re inherently there for one another. But when they turn to stone, where is Elisa left? She’s in a corner, crying in a pile of hay, which can’t be that comfortable. She was responsible for driving her confidante away and putting him in this position, and there’s nothing she can do but declare war on the most invincible man in the world. The only sliver of hope left lies in the existence of two sociopaths, and no one even knows one of them still exists. As cynical as season one was, this episode is hopelessness, through and through.

If I were to make a list of episodes to show someone who’s never seen Gargoyles, “Metamorphosis” would definitely be on the list. It’s not a perfect episode by any standards—I’d say “best episode” still belongs to “Awakening, Part Five” right now—but it’s a great representation of how dark it can get, and how it does that darkness well. The only things really holding it back are the weak animation team and the extent to which Xanatos’s gambit complicates what the episode tries to do. But ultimately, that’s nothing compared to the pit this episode leaves in your stomach. I can’t say anyone likes feeling that way, but that the show can hook us in so completely on an emotional level is a testament to how much it’s grown. There’s not a lot of poetic depth or moral undertones flowing through here, but it’s cleverly put together, and certainly makes you feel. Even if the feeling it gives is pretty hopeless.

Next time: I really want to make a Mass Effect reference. (“Legion”)

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/16/i-was-fooling-myself-metamorphosis-2/feed/247durkinator2747There's like 8 bajillion ways this could go wrong that DON'T involve genetic engineering.So he gives her an "everything" hot dog with JUST MUSTARD in vengeance.Da fuq kinda plane is that?"Dude, what normal children would even GET that reference?"http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PaddingAw, she made a heart with her food! She thinks she's people!Well, she does hide in the shadows about as well as Demona.EYE SCREAMWHAT KIND OF TRANQS DO THAT?!?!...Too easy.Good god her wrist must be HUGE.18Science, amirite?All they need now are mates. Ehhhh guys?Why are my ears as pointy as his?!I just see window panes, but I'll trust your judgement.Nailed it.29313234353739414344484950515253Revenge is a Sucker’s Game: “Leader of the Pack”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/revenge-is-a-suckers-game-leader-of-the-pack/
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Any good superhero team needs an opposing supervillain team. Even amongst the craziness this show has thrown out, The Pack is still the closest to feeling like colorful, wacky comic book villains. It also makes them the least interesting ones so far, but at least we can get some fun, mindless action out of them. It’s not like an episode about The Pack can yield anything with nightmare fuel or romance, right?

After a brand-spanking new season 2 opening—well, it now has the iconic voiceover and a couple of new scenes to replace some of a lamer ones—we open with a dude in a robotic coyote suit scaling a wall, not unlike how gargoyles do with their claws. It’s a prison, one so high security that it possesses exactly one hallway guard with the most inexplicably bad hair I’ve seen on this show, which issaying something.

I just…you’d think the hat would make it better but…it doesn’t. I just…I just don’t understand.

Coyote dude uses a sonic wave on the guard that screws with his senses and makes him hallucinate…pretty horrifically, actually.

He’s been hit by a Dalí Ray. Eh? Ehhhhh?

But seriously, it’s unexpectedly freaky, not to mention the trauma the guard is visibly in afterwards. It’s a striking way to start the episode…until the music becomes stupidly peaceful and quaint after the device is turned off and the Coyote dude steals the guard’s keys. Not sure who made that choice with the score, but it’s a lame one.

If it wasn’t apparent in the episode’s title, members of The Pack are the ones being sprung from this prison. We get a peak of how they’re spending their lives behind bars: Jackal is chillin’, Wolf is doing like a billion one-handed push-ups, Hyena is playing with cockroaches, and Fox…well….

50 Shades of Grey wasn’t out yet, so Jean-Paul Sartre was pretty much the next best thing.

“Nieztche’s too butch and Kafka reminds me of your little friends over there,” Fox says, referring to the cockroaches (ha!). I’m not familiar with Sartre’s writing beyond what I skimmed on his Wikipedia page, so I can’t say if it’s some sly reference to the underlying theme of the episode (last time was more existentialist than this one is.) But it’s probably meant to quickly establish her intellect, which wasn’t readily apparent in her first appearance as a generic bad guy and second as a lovestruck accomplice. Showing her reading about French philosophy and Marxism is a little…forced, to say the least, but it gives color to a character that feels like she should be more important than she has been. It also makes sense given how the structure and ultimate goal of the episode unfolds, but we’ll get to that at the end.

Anyway, Dingo arrives to free the guys and stops them from building a pillow fort, having been presumably freed by Coyote.

They didn’t have enough blankets anyway.

Coyote introduces himself to the girls, on the other hand (he identifies himself as Coyote, which…duh.) Hyena is immediately smitten, of course, and since the only way to impress a guy is with murder, she goes after a guard.

Why is showing a women’s prison without lesbian subtext so IMPOSSIBLE?!

Fox, however, saves the guard’s life by stopping Hyena from murdering her. This is a much more interesting way to present Fox as someone with hidden depths, as she plans to stay in prison and “fulfill her debt.” Hyena thinks she’s nuts, but suddenly we’re all the more intrigued.

That said, it’s also an easy way to set-up this new member and obvious leader of The Pack (see what I did there?) And that’s exactly what Coyote shows off he’s capable of, as he tears the place to shreds with his super strength and array of blasters.

He also definitely killed every single one of those men. Without a doubt.

After this extensive sequence, Elisa informs the clan that The Pack was freed by “Dingo and someone dressed in black.” …Black?

I guess she’s…half accurate…?

Anyway, Lex freaks out as par the course for him, though his freak-out this time is kind of… well…

Adorable, is what it is. And quite silly, especially considering it amounts a Popeye routine. The silliness is mostly the result of the animation, which morphs what’s supposed to be uneasy fidgeting into a jittery mess. That’s unfair to the character, admittedly, because it’s clear that Lex is meant to be acting irrationally angry. I like Brooklyn quite a lot in this scenario, as he sympathizes with Lex’s plight and tries to keep him tempered like any good bro ought to.

Back with The Pack, Coyote instills himself as the new leader (duh) to Wolf’s dismay. The two tussle, but Coyote kicks his ass. It’s pretty standard “supervillains fight amongst themselves because they’re shitty people” fare, but it’s in-character for Wolf, especially.

Woof.

If it wasn’t obvious that Coyote was being voiced by Jonathan Frakes this whole time, he unmasks himself to everyone’s “surprise.” It’s becoming apparent now that if someone’s in a cybernetic anthropomorphic animal battlesuit, it’s definitely going to be Xanatos.

It’s a fetish, right?

Something’s…off about all this, though. Particularly that Xanatos voices his main motivation as getting revenge on The Gargoyles for thwarting his plans all the time. He’s never really been all that pissed at them before, and has even all-but-admitted his lack of hard feelings towards them. Was his loss in “Reawakening” really all that bad? This is Xanatos we’re talking about, so it’s obvious that he must be playing The Pack somehow. But until that becomes clear, he’s spending his time giving The Pack their old duds back and bringing them together as a team. Which prompts Wolf to casually rip off his shirt in delight.

He’s my favorite character in this episode.

Meanwhile, with the knowledge that Xanatos created The Pack Goliath barges into Xanatos’s place like a beast.

Swag.

Owen is the only one there, since Xanatos doesn’t keep his castle-mansion fully-staffed due to all he illegal robot weapons and monsters barging in all the time, presumably. Goliath demands information, but all Owen does is give them sly hints for where The Pack may be (i.e. tells them exactly where to go and what to do.) It’s an odd, slightly lazy choice to have Owen just…tell them where to go, but that’s something we’ll address at the end.

Brooklyn goes with Lex and Bronx to Pack Media Studios, and Brooklyn uses the opportunity to try and quell Lex’s rage. Not that continuity is a surprise in this show, but it’s notable how Brooklyn uses his very similar betrayal by Demona to empathize. It doesn’t work, but it’s a noble enough effort. Brooklyn frankly hasn’t gotten very much solo screentime in the show thus far, so his conversations with Lex showcase a level of common sense and intelligence that weren’t apparent before. It fits with what we’ve seen, given how snarky and sarcastic he normally is—he’s usually just voicing common sense—and, like Fox, gives the slightest bit of color to an otherwise underdeveloped character. Not that it matters for Lex, because as soon as The Pack shows up…

Fav. or. ite.

Lex has about the reaction you’d expect.

Holy shit this episode produces the best screencaps.

Brooklyn tries to hold back his buddy, but Lex just can’t resist.

…I’m sorry for this.

They try to fight off The Pack, and while they lose badly, it’s a decent enough sequence. Brooklyn gets lots of hits on Hyena, which is surprising considering most action cartoons’ avoidance of having dudes hit chicks. But this show has done a nice job with throwing out women on par with or stronger than the men, so it’s only fair that a particularly nasty one can take a sucker punch square in the jaw.

Lex’s utterly ridiculous unbound rage is especially fun to watch, and you can’t help but love seeing the little guy wail on everyone. His anger is stretched out to a cartoonish extent, admittedly, but I’d like to think it’s meant to showcase a big point about his character. Lex is bound to have an inferiority complex considering his stature, his baldness, and the fact that he’s the smart nerdy one among all the buff fighters. His clan is good to him and it doesn’t seem like he’s been bullied, but he is certainly more susceptible to it, and has probably been left out or forgotten by accident on numerous occasions. It’s enough to have frustration built up within him, even if he hasn’t had as many bad things happen to him directly. And even though he’s never flown off the handle this badly before, he’s shown to get pretty angry when he’s being abused by people for being different, like the townsfolk in the pilot and the kids in the alley in “The Thrill of the Hunt.”

“Sonic hallucinatory blaster beats rock!”

As usual, Lex, Brooklyn and Bronx are kidnapped when The Pack wins the battle (Brooklyn even remarks how this is becoming a pattern.) The rest of the clan shows up per Owen’s message, but only after The Pack has cleared out. They then get another lead from Owen, who calls a phone at the building. Again, he tells them exactly where to go to find The Pack, which this time is on a boat…just…because. Why he didn’t just tell them to go straight there in the first place instead of having them detour to the studio is beyond me, though. It’s all lazy, if we’re being honest.

“And then you’ll head to the clock tower and Goliath will have brief but unrequited sexual tension with Elisa, and Broadway will make a crack about wanting dinner while Hudson summarizes the moral of the story, and Brooklyn and Lex will make a funny joke that gets cut off just as the sun comes up and you turn to stone. And Elisa will smile and leave as big orchestral music explodes. Got it?”

In any case, everyone knows everything is a trap and no one cares because we’ve got to get to the action. And we do, as a fight with guns and big sonic weapons breaks out on the boat, yadda yadda yadda.

Gotta give them credit, they know how to be sensible and use Big Fucking Guns rather than rely on just silly Wolverine claws and boomerangs.

The fight is pretty much what you’d expect, with some cool moments mixed with generic fighting moves. In the midst of all this, Lex, Brooklyn and Bronx escape and join the fight, and a fire breaks out, as they often do. Hudson gets some cool moves in, like slashing off Hyena’s claws, which isn’t physically possible but okay.

“Not physically possible” is, like, every episode ever.

Goliath also fights back Coyote’s hallucinogenic sonic wave because…well, I don’t know. Everyone always talks about how perfect of a trump card Goliath is, so I guess it makes sense. It would have been cool if the heroes had to come up with some creative way to stop the wave from working rather than just…the power of being the perfect stud, or whatever. Anyway, Goliath eventually unmasks Coyote as Xanatos and gets into a pretty epic wrestling match with him (which was spoiled in the new opening credits.)

And Goliath uses his signature “passive-aggressively Waltz” move.

And then finally something happens that isn’t totally predictable.

Bronx rabidly murders Xanatos and has to be put down.

Well, it’s freaky enough that we see Bronx ripping a guy’s face off, but it’s justified when we find that:

Yo dawg, I heard you like Xanatos in a robot, so we put a robot in Xanatos in a robot so a Xanatos robot could be inside a Xanatos robot!

First of all: GAAAAH! And also: Cool! This whole development seems entirely unnecessary and tacked-on at first, but it also explains the inconsistencies. Why was Xanatos suddenly so squarely focused on revenge? He wasn’t, it was just the main mission this particular android was programmed for. Also, Hyena says, “A robot? Even better…” with a smirk, so you know, we have similar tastes.

But nevermind all that, because Lex shoots a hole through Coyote’s torso and Goliath KICKS HIS SCREAMING HEAD OFF.

JESUS CHRIST

So there’s your nightmare fuel for the next week. Explosions prevent The Gargoyles from getting a full win in, though, as the boat starts sinking and The Pack gets away. Our heroes glide away, though not before a creative and well-animated moment where Bronx howls while almost sinking with the ship.

How can a face-ripping murder machine be this cute?

Lex apologizes to Brooklyn, too, citing their almost dying in battle and losing Brooklyn because of his carelessness as helping him get his priorities straight. It’s not much of a resolution since the consequences weren’t really that huge (every episode ends in a crazy battle where they almost die) but it’s as much of an arc as we’re bound to get with everything going on. Lex still has the capacity to fly off the handle, though, and that leaves something for the show to deal with later on down the line.

Back at the prison, we find that Fox has been granted an early parole, mostly thanks to her actions during the breakout.

She’s definitely a good guy.

Her ride when she gets out?

“Ride”

“Who won?” Fox asks Xanatos. “It never mattered. It was the icing, you’re the cake.” Xanatos built a robot—of which he could build dozens—just to break The Pack out to allow Fox to not escape and thus get an early parole. Everything else with The Pack vs. The Gargoyles was just kinda for fun, a test to see which wacky team of misfits would win in a fight. Because Xanatos is not only a playa, he’s a player. Like, of chess. “Revenge is a sucker’s game,” he says. “True love was the main mission.” That’s my Xanatos.

And then, of course, we end on a quaint, fitting scene of–

AGH WHY IS HE JUST CARRYING THAT AROUND?!?!

What the heck did we just watch? I don’t really mean that in a bad way—well, not mostly. There’s a lot of random bits thrown into “Leader of the Pack”, but not always bits that make this particular episode terribly interesting. The main plot is so color-by-numbers that it’s laughable (again, Owen literally tells everyone how to get from plot point to plot point), but that can be rationalized by everyone following and falling into Xanatos’s plans. However, things like the nightmare fuel-inducing sonic wave or Lex’s rage—which you’d think would make up the primary goals or plot devices of the episode—are inexplicably beaten and quickly resolved, respectively. With that in mind, this episode fails miserably as a standalone action adventure. At least “The Thrill of the Hunt” had a pseudo-moral; this one just lets Lex wail on The Pack a bit and then ends.

But then, it’s a bit of a bait-and-switch for our expectations. Where the main plot fails, it makes up for (and makes a whole lot more sense as) being the season premiere, and functioning as a surprise introduction to upcoming threads. This episode confirms the romance between Xanatos and Fox, and throws out clues for why they’d be compatible. It introduces a creepy-ass robot head called Coyote, and the way it’s ominously presented at the end teases that it might become something important down the road. It’s also another showcase of just how good Xanatos is at manipulating people. Even when people know they’re being manipulated, they end up being manipulated to do something else completely. The final scene ratchets this episode way up in points as we realize what it was doing this whole time, and the 20 minute misdirect is a perfect representation of everything we love about Xanatos.

But at that, “Leader of the Pack” still remains a lackluster affair on its own. The last 60 seconds are the most important, but we could have used some tightening to not feel like everything leading up to it was a waste of time. That’s a shame, but at least the surprising bits successfully amp up excitement for what’s to come in this second season. Xanatos was scary enough for being a super-smart weirdo, but now he’s a super-smart weirdo who’s in love and has something to lose. That’s bound to make things more interesting for him.

Next time: Fox isn’t a fan of Kafka, but apparently someone is.

JESUS CHRIST.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/revenge-is-a-suckers-game-leader-of-the-pack/feed/025durkinator27252JESUS CHRIST50 Shades of Grey wasn't out yet, so this was pretty much the next best thing.They didn't have enough blankets anyway.Why is showing a women's prison without lesbian subtext so IMPOSSIBLE?!He also...like...definitely killed every single one of those men. Without a doubt.I guess she's...half accurate...?1112Woof.He's got a "taking off the mask of a cybernetic anthropomorphic animal exosuit" fetish.Sidenote: Wolf is my favorite character in this episode.16Fav. or. ite.Holy shit this episode produces the best screencaps....I'm sorry for that.This show would look terrible in screencap form."And then you'll head to the clock tower and Goliath will have brief but unrequited sexual tension with Elisa, and Broadway will make a crack about wanting dinner while Hudson summarizes the moral of the story, and Brooklyn and Lex will make a funny joke that gets cut off just as the sun comes up and you turn to stone. And Elisa will smile at leave as big orchestral music explodes. Got it?"22"Not physically possible" is, like, every episode ever.And Goliath uses his signature "passive-aggressively Waltz" move.Bronx rabidly kills Xanatos and has to be put down.Yo dawg, I know you like Xanatos in a robot, so we put a robot in Xanatos in a robot so a Xanatos robot could be inside a Xanatos robot!JESUS CHRISTHow can a face-ripping murder machine be this cute?She's definitely a good guy."Ride""Our baby."33What Do You Protect?: “Reawakening”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/what-do-you-protect-reawakening/
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It took a little over 3 months for the first season of Gargoyles to air. It’s taken nearly six times as long for this blog to get through it. Pathetic as that may be, I’m cranking out a better workflow to get these pumped out throughout this year without unplanned breaks. The serendipity of it all? It’s now the top of 2014, the 20th anniversary of Gargoyles! Well, technically it will be the 20th anniversary in about 10 months, but you know…semantics, right? Semantics are actually a big deal in the first season finale of the show, so we’re going to break into the meaning of a big gargoyle mantra…by way of a cybernetic zombie, of course.

Right from the get-go, “Reawakening” sports a full-circleness that Gargoyles will come to embrace, with an obvious call back to the title of the pilot. But more than that, we also have flashbacks to (presumably) some in-between scenes during the Viking invasion seen in the pilot. It’s weird to think that in the entire season we’ve only had one other instance of character flashbacks, but it sets the tone that the upcoming events will be much heftier than another villain-of-the-week.

In that flashback, we meet a gargoyle we’ve never seen before, but is apparently close with the leading trifecta.

Two Guys, a Girl, and a Scottish Place.

He’s voiced by Michael Dorn, so if you have any semblance of pop culture knowledge, it’s obvious from the sound of his voice that he’s going to be important. A minor beef is that he is a character we’ve never seen up until this episode, despite so many background gargoyle designs already having been seen. It’d be cool to have gotten a sense of continuity if our big new gargoyle was someone there from day one, but hey, hindsight is 20/20.

Anyway, Magus is doing his whole “wah wah wah you suck but please help” routine, which really only serves to prompt Hudson to spout out this episode’s mantra: “A gargoyle can no longer stop protecting the castle than breathing the air.” A mantra which is promptly repeated about a minute later in the present.

“YES grampa, you HAVE told your story about Eartha Kitt in the airplane bathroom. Like three times. It’s still gross.”

Luckily, the trio recognizes the cheesy, outdatedness of that mantra, which works in its favor. It’s already clear that the goal of this episode isn’t to hammer in that “gargoyles protect”—we know that already, so why would we care? Instead, it’s going to be about breaking down exactly what that mantra means, bit by bit. Because as it stands, it’s just the ramblings of Grampa. Lex even hilariously points out that they don’t live in a castle anymore. If it’s supposed to be a metaphor, everyone’s still following it literally.

Elisa shows up, and she does some fierce segueing to get Goliath from talking about the weather to talking about his feelings in, like, seven words. (It amounts to “It’s cold out there.” / “The cold doesn’t bother us.” / “Well, something is.”) It’s very smartly written dialogue.

Therapize, guuuuuuurl.

Goliath is contemplative as usual, but what brings him out of his shell is when Elisa casually mentions the police motto: to protect and serve. The show’s penchant for having the gargoyles misunderstand and learn about society’s basic concepts resurfaces—something we haven’t seen recently, since they’ve become more acclimated to the world—as Goliath misinterprets the police as Elisa’s “clan.” Though in a way, he’s not wrong. Our coworkers can form a clan, in a sense, but as this entire episode posits, everything depends on how you think about these things. The angle in which Goliath is interested in this case is the police clan’s mantra, which involves protecting and serving the people of their precinct.

Meanwhile at Xanatos’s place, he and Demona are teaming up once more. This time, they’ve got a scheme that’s absurdly simple for the two of them: if magic and science never work separately, then…well…

The fact that their path this season has led to narrowing the scope of their schemes is an ingenious way to go. The downside is that, when all is said and done, this plan doesn’t make the proceedings feel very big, at least not as big as you’d expect a finale to be. Then again, this is still an early 90s kids’ show; heavy serialization was barelya thing for children’s media, and blow-out finales for the serialization were only just starting to be a thing.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t incorporate my plan to give children candy laced with isotopes that make whatever they touch glow green light which will attract Lexington because that’s his favorite color and when he investigates we’ll trap him and ransom him for Hudson’s sword which we’ll use as a lightning rod to generate electricity to bring this guy to life? Just for kicks?”

In any case, the effects in the Frankenstein scene are really cool! This is another A+ animation episode, and the use of the lightning and sparkly magical waves of light are gorgeous. And of course, Xanatos does an “It’s alive!” reference, and it’s the hammiest thing you will ever see in your life. I can’t even say if it’s used well or poorly. It doesn’t even matter. Its hamminess just transcends beyond anything the human mind has the capacity to pass judgement on.

A GOD AMONG MEN.

The gargoyle we saw in the flashback unsurprisingly wakes up, the product of their machinations (literally.) Demona, who he would remember and trust, calls Xanatos her servant.

Bitch would a SERVANT look this damn fine?

But more importantly, she says “You are cold stone brought to life,” indirectly naming him after a a delicious creamery (though, it’s worth noting that no one actually identifies him with the name Coldstone in this episode.) Either way, the last thing he remembers is Goliath and Hudson going to find the Vikings, which Demona twists into saying they abandoned the clan and left them to die. And worse, they inexplicably turned him into a…

Gargoyle with a cool helmet…?

Okay, something I definitely take issue with in this episode is how much the body horror element is just…not there. Or at least, it doesn’t work for me personally. Perhaps that’s my own tastes coming through, I don’t know. And it’s not like Robocop really looked that horrific, but we knew he was disfigured because we saw it violently happen in the context of the movie. The disfigurement underneath the armor here is meant to be inferred—he was built from his smashed body parts glued together—so it’s not really a worthy criticism on my part.

But at the same time, the horror at his disfigurement—especially considering the robotic machinery would be totally alien to him—is painted as his primary motivation for wanting revenge. So buying into his anger is heavily reliant on sympathizing with his predicament. We’re probably supposed to infer that the anger is tied to losing his clan, too, but that’s sort of a problem: we aren’t given much time to be introduced to Coldstone, so we have to rush through his motivations to get him angry enough at Goliath. The solutions is to make his appearance, and the big reveal of it, be representative of all the anger and total disorientation he’s suddenly feeling after being supposedly betrayed by Goliath. Ergo, his appearance is super important. But honestly…he just looks pretty damn cool. Like, here’s a more full view of him later:

Full disclosure: I just had this spare screencap and wanted to break up the text with an image for the sake of aesthetics. I think too much into this stupid blog.

In any case, though Coldstone’s motivation is way too rushed and oversimplified, he’s meant to be more of a talking point and plot device. And we’ll get to that later. (Man, there’s a lot to talk about with this one!)

Elisa and Matt head to a store that was robbed right at the beginning of the episode (a scene that’s pretty funny considering the shopkeeper’s “Really? Again?” reaction.) Matt notes that the guy’s been robbed three times this month, and laments their inability to protect him. Elisa uses a “hi-tech” mic-necklace and earpiece to communicate with Goliath, which ought to simplify some storytelling from here on out.

“I don’t see why whispering ‘penis’ is necessary to test these?”

Goliath questions why the storekeeper doesn’t leave, but Elisa explains that the storekeeper is necessary for the community. Essentially, he has a responsibility to the people around him. This will be on the quiz later, kids.

Elisa and Matt get called to some mayhem, where Coldstone is on a rampage and tearing a building up for, well, no discernible reason. Presumably Xanatos and Demona just…told him to destroy things, but again, we hop right from Coldstone’s awakening to him doing generic bad guy stuff. Time is limited of course, but man, this just jumps from point to point without a breath. “Here’s a cool new gargoyle and WHOA NOW HE’S ANGRY AND THROWING A CAR AT YOU.”

That escalated quickly.

Goliath swoops in to save the day, and calls Coldstone an “abomination.” So, again, the implication is that Coldstone is frightening nightmare fuel, but that’s undercut by the fact that he has a frickin’ laser beam in his arm.

Shit, can I be an abomination, too? That’s totally rad.

One thing I quite like about this finale, though, is that it swiftly gets all the gargoyles into the fray for the final battle. The trio overhears the battle outside during their movie: “That surround sound sure is great.” / “I don’t remember any explosions in Bambi.” The implication of which is that they not only go to the theater to see Bambi, but they’ve already seen it multiple times. They swoop into battle, and start busting out and chucking hubcaps at the bad guy, a very creative bit of improvisation.

Things get interesting when Demona shows up with Xanatos (masked in his Big Red armor) and another Steel Clan bot. They clearly didn’t rehearse their big villain speeches, though; after making another argument for Coldstone to get revenge on Goliath for being a big jerk, Demona and Xanatos immediately disagree on their fundamental goals. Demona wants all the gargoyles dead because she’s squarely focused on revenge, while Xanatos wants them alive for tests and stuff. These are elements already established in episodes prior, which is a nice example of tying a season together through character arcs rather than sprawling plot arcs. Again, it keeps “Reawakening” from feeling like a terribly big finale, but it still feels like a finale nevertheless.

Coldstone doesn’t think it’s worth living like the super cool laser-blasting cyborg warrior that he is, but Demona tells him, “Appearances mean nothing,” suddenly being all subversive. A lesson on body image acceptance isn’t on her agenda, though; her argument now has switched to, “We are the true gargoyles” while Goliath and his ilk have been “corrupted by the humans.” So here, we circle back to the mantra from the beginning, but from a different angle: gargoyles can no more stop defending the castle than breathing the air, but what exactly makes that gargoyle a gargoyle in the first place?

In any case, Goliath tries to convince him that all the death means they should stop, Xanatos isn’t interested in destroying the city because he’s pretty reasonable, and the news vans are showing up, so they decide to meet up to battle elsewhere. Also, this is the second episode in which the city is clearly seeing the gargoyles up close and talking to each other. But the news didn’t catch it all clearly on camera, so I guess it makes sense for them to still be urban legends? The world before smartphones made it much easier to keep a secret.

Today there’d be 38 different angles recorded and uploaded, 6 dubstep remixes on YouTube, and a Fox News report blaming it on Obamacare.

This also gets Hudson and Bronx into the fold—every single moment in this episode serves a purpose, which is awesome—as they see the news report. However, Hudson is torn: no one can guard the tower if he leaves. If memory serves, that’d be like not breathing the air.

To scale up the epicness of the climactic battle, the fight breaks out on the Brooklyn Bridge. Goliath and Coldstone confront each other with some generic Judas-y talk (“I don’t want to hurt you!” / “You already have!”) but it’s complemented by decent fight sequences from everyone.

And they passive-aggressively Waltz together.

A very small, but very cool moment has the trio take down the Red Steel Clan bot, only to find out that it was Xanatos all along. It’s a fairly insignificant reveal for a mystery that wasn’t presented as a big deal, but tying up that loose end is appreciated. Also Broadway gets tangled up in the cables holding up the bridge, and there’s so many things weird and wrong with that entire concept and execution.

How does that happen BY ACCIDENT?!

Anyway, we get our dramatic moment when Goliath and Coldstone topple into the water. As Goliath drowns, Hudson’s words reverberate in his head, with particular emphasis on “breathing the air” and “protect.” To be honest, the air bit is eye-rollingly on-the-nose, but that so much thought was put into tying everything in this together so tightly is much appreciated.

“OH! It means we SHOULDN’T have to breath air, right?”

Then something interesting happens. Coldstone reaches out and saves Goliath, flying him back up onto the bridge. Coldstone was there when Hudson spoke the words in the flashback, so we know he follows the mantra too. Goliath’s our hero, so any big booming-voice epiphany would normally go to him, but we forget that Coldstone was contemplating that same mantra. It’s going through both of their heads; they’re simply looking at it from different angles. Goliath was working through what a gargoyle has to protect, while Coldstone was hung up on what it means to be that gargoyle in the first place. If a gargoyle has to protect a castle, but all they’re out for now is “mere survival” as he says, then does that even make them gargoyles?

The wind beneath my wings.

Saving Goliath’s life shows that Coldstone knows the answer deep down, but he and Goliath have been letting semantics and outside influences cloud their judgement. Ultimately, Goliath answers both their questions: “Gargoyles protect. It is our nature, our purpose. To lose that is to be corrupt…empty…lifeless.” Coldstone then asks the million dollar question: “And what do you protect?”

Coldstone questioned what made him a gargoyle, when the simple truth is that the very act of being a protector is what makes him a gargoyle at heart, totally rad cybernetic enhancements or not. Goliath was hung up on the literal interpretation, that they must protect the castle, when the key world is meant to be protect.

Demona is a total buzzkill when it comes to existential epiphanies, though, and shoots Coldstone with her Big Fucking Gun before they can answer the question, knocking him back into the water for good.

Okay, I can see the body horror sorta coming out now.

Surprisingly, Xanatos saves the clan from being killed right on the spot since he wants them alive. That is, until Bronx, Hudson and Elisa show up and save them from being kidnapped by Xanatos…who promptly grabs Demona and flies away.

…Hero shot?

After searching the water, Goliath emerges with no luck. “He was not a monster, he was family. And now he’s gone,” he says. We again come full circle to “Awakening”, where Goliath just can’t catch a break. On a lighter note, the shadows in this scene are beautifully rendered, so he’s got that going for him which is nice. The gargoyles bug Goliath to answer the question from earlier (which is kind of a dick move since his friend just died, but whatever.) What do they protect?

The easy answer would be that they just protect in general, which is where the episode seemed to be leading, and that the castle part of the mantra doesn’t matter. But Goliath is still an old fashioned guy, and no one can uproot their entire life view that easily. They’re still protecting the castle—it’s the definition of castle that’s changed. Manhattan is their castle, and all the people in it are their charges. Goliath swears his clan will protect all who live there, human and gargoyle alike.

“Are you all right? Is there anything you need?” Elisa asks, which is supremely sweet. But we all know Elisa is awesome. The answer to that question?

“Yes, I need a detective.”

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZINGA!!!!!!!!

That’s a really great ending in and of itself, but we’re treated with an epilogue of sorts to the closing of this chapter. The robber from the beginning of the episode runs into the store with all the money he stole, begging for the cops to turn him in “Because six monsters just told me to.” As Elisa says, the city feels safer already.

The gargoyles have been reactionary to everything this season, pretty much on the run and without much purpose. It’s been reflected in the show, which meandered throughout its first season without much of a clear goal outside of “survive.” But as it turns out, the show played a trick on us. We weren’t just watching a fantasy-melodrama. We were watching an origin story for an unconventional group of superheroes. In “Reawakening”, that superhero team is officially formed. This clan of gargoyles are now, finally: The Gargoyles, protectors of Manhattan.

Though, would he really keep all his stolen money unspent, in bunches, in a burlap sack? Plotholes, plotholes…

Wow, right? “Reawakening” was a lot harder to break into, because it’s sort of a paradox in how it wears its depth on the surface. A lot of the interesting bits that I could normally write stupidly long and overly wordy run-on sentences about are not only brought up and debated, but play very heavily into nearly every decision the main characters make. It’s such a precise, tightly-wound story that unraveling it was unusually messy. It also makes the episode feel unfairly underwhelming; lots of things happen without time to process them, and yet the episode still tends to drag sometimes (the fight on the bridge did not hold my attention until its climax, for example.) This episode isn’t plotted like a finale at all, with no real big twists that demand fanfare and an extremely simple plot, moreso than pretty much every episode this season. Coldstone, while representative of the best philosophical material in the episode, isn’t much of a character (even if Dorn is perfect in the role.) As such, it’s not as much fun to watch as it is to write about. Which, in the end, is a massive hindrance on the overall quality. There are lots of other half-hours that are more entertaining.

But damn if this isn’t still an interesting episode. In addition to the existential questions and the superhero formation, this is more or less the first time the heroes have truly beat the odds and won. Or, rather, where the villains have absolutely, definitively lost. There’s an element of tragedy in that Coldstone dies at the end of this episode, but it’s not all for naught (and come on, it’s pretty obvious that he’ll be back.) There’s no grander master plan at play that we know of. Demona and Xanatos teamed up, and they failed. And even with the loss of Coldstone, the good guys aren’t at any more of a loss than they were from the start.

In fact, the purpose they’ve gained supersedes that. It took Goliath about eight episodes to figure out he was allowed to move out of his castle, and that was with lots of pushing. The revelation here is the biggest one we’ve gotten yet, and Goliath put the pieces together on his own. That’s a big damn deal. For the first time, our hero is being proactive, creating his own destiny in a way. And as the leader, he’s in turn opened up that option for the rest of his clan. That’s awesome, and for a show that’s spent its first season being decidedly cynical, it’s an exciting, hopeful note for things to end on (and start this anniversary year on!)

Next time: Leader of the Pack? More like Leader of the Whack, amirite?

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2014/01/04/what-do-you-protect-reawakening/feed/09durkinator279245"Are you sure we shouldn't incorporate my plan to give children candy laced with isotopes that make whatever they touch glow green light which will attract Lexington because that's his favorite color and when he investigates we'll trap him and ransom him for Hudson's sword which we'll use as a lightning rod to generate electricity to bring this guy to life? Just for kicks?"A GOD AMONG MEN.10Gargoyle with a cool helmet...?Full disclosure: I just had this spare screencap and wanted to break up the text with an image. I think too much into this stupid blog."I don't see why whispering 'penis' is necessary to test these?"THE FIRE HYDRANT LOOKED AT ME FUNNYShit, can I be an abomination, too? That's totally rad."Bet you're feeling TIRE-d now!" - Why I'm not a successful screenwriter.Today there'd be 38 different angles of this on YouTube, 6 dubstep remixes, and a Fox News report blaming it on Obamacare. And they passive-aggressively Waltz together.How does that happen BY ACCIDENT?!25You are the wind beneath my wings.Okay, I can see the body horror sorta coming out now....Hero shot?BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZINGA!Though, would he really keep all his stolen money unspent, in bunches, in a burlap sack? Plotholes, plotholes...Lead Your Own Life: “Her Brother’s Keeper”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/lead-your-own-life-her-brothers-keeper/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/lead-your-own-life-her-brothers-keeper/#commentsMon, 19 Aug 2013 01:52:25 +0000http://weliveagain.wordpress.com/?p=666Continue reading →]]>

Elisa Maza is the action hero of Gargoyles. While all other characters have their super gargoyle powers, or technological enhancements, or Machiavellian intellect, Elisa has normal human wits, normal human strength, and an extreme drive. She’s the underdog, the audience surrogate, the everyman, and just a pinch of love interest all mixed in one super cool, red-jacketed package. Thus far, her flaw has been nothing more than just being an average human. But the cracks are starting to show, and the everyday humanity that makes Elisa such a likeable character might ultimately lead to her downfall.

As a quick personal anecdote: the major reason this blog had to cease for a while was because of the stage production I was working on in my off-time, in addition to the day job getting increasingly more intense in the past few months. It all kind of came to a head at the same time, and even though I thought I’d prepared for it and what it would entail, I ultimately had to turn my back—both intentionally and unintentionally—on a lot of things, friends and family included, to make it all work. It was justified in some (not all) cases, because you have to make sacrifices for your work, especially when you have other people involved in that work depending on you.

The reason I’m mentioning this now, aside trying to subtly throw in an excuse and apology, is that I learned something throughout the process: no matter how much you believe in what you’re doing, if it comes at the cost of your loved ones, you’re going to feel like crap regardless. If you cast off people for any reason, even if it’s for a noble cause, someone will get hurt. Someone will inevitably be angry or upset, even if only slightly, even if they never verbalize it, and even if you never intended to hurt them, it’s still ultimately your fault for making that choice. In my case, the “noble” cause wasn’t anything more than putting on a donation-based community show that would hopefully attract people without the disposable income to spend on expensive theatre. In Elisa Maza’s case, it’s protecting a secret race of sentient creatures and while protecting everday people at the same time.

Elisa works all hours of the night and presumably some hours of the day, too. Not once has she gone out for drinks to chat about her dating problems with her best gal pal. We’ve never even seen her on a date. In fact, as friendly as she’s been with her coworkers, we’ve never seen her hang out with any of them outsideof work. The only time we saw her family was when she was in a hospital bed potentially dying.And granted, in these 11 episodes she’s often doing her own thing, so who knows what she might have been up to offscreen. But consider that when we did get her “day in the life” in “The Edge”, what was she doing? Working. Helping out the gargoyles. Working again. Working and helping out the gargoyles. When we’ve seen her have downtime in “Deadly Force”, she’s hanging out alone, with her cat, until Broadway stops in. As personable as this lady is, she doesn’t seem to have even a speck of a social life outside of the gargoyles. Maybe she did before they came along and she found a purpose with them, I don’t know. But since we’ve met her, she hasn’t really done much else—whether that’s tragic, normal, or justified is up to your perspective at this point, but the concept is there.

So it’s initially unique, then, that “Her Brother’s Keeper” opens up with Elisa finally spending quality time with her brother, Derek.

“You can’t keep using cop resources to stalk the hotties!”

Except it has nothing to do with him—she’s obsessing over Xanatos, trying to follow him to find out what nefarious schemes he might be planning; Derek’s just there because he can fly a helicopter, making it easier to follow. Derek calls her out on using him and his police connections just to indulge her little obsession, and he’s totally right. As much of a dick as Xanatos has been to the gargoyles, thus far there hasn’t been any attempt at a “master” plan beyond what’s already happened, so actively trying to find something bad is kind of unfounded at this point. But Elisa, as we’ve seen since her first introduction, has an intense drive and sense of responsibility (like meeting the hot gargoyle once and then turning into John-fucking-McClane.) And you could say she does have a responsibility to keep an eye on the arch-enemy. But just a couple of minutes in, and it’s clear there’s a rift between Elisa and Derek because of this; he’s completely validated in feeling used. She barely even makes conversation with him outside of XanatosXanatosXanatos.

Meanwhile, the gargoyles are playing a video game. Or some semblance of one.

Technology on Gargoyles is my favorite thing in the world.

Elisa didn’t give them Final Fantasy, though, she gave them a helicopter simulator, which pretty much makes her on par with Marge Simpson in terms of video game gifts. Broadway asks the million dollar question: “Why do you wanna learn to fly a helicopter, you’ve got wings!” The response is merely more fat jacks.

He may chew with his mouth open, but at at least he has COMMON SENSE.

Meanwhile, Xanatos, being Xanatos, is apparently aware that he’s being followed. He ends up at the Diamond Exchange, where we run into our favorite terrible haircuts, Jackal and Hyena.

Totally inconspicuous.

The pointy-haired duo mention that Wolf and Fox are in prison, and Dingo is somehow in Europe…whether these two escaped or what is never established. They decide to steal a “Coyote Diamond” (foreshadowing?), but someone has already bought it on the spot. The only reason they don’t grab it and shoot up the place? “Style.”

Give him a hand! All hands on deck! Something clever about a handshake! I don’t know, I couldn’t think of a caption for this.

Hyena has a fucking mental breakdown when it gets purchased, which is exquisitely animated and hilarious. If the goal was to make these two look more unhinged than they already were, it’s been met.

How I look after after dying on Candy Crush Saga Level 29 for the 500th time.

Finally, Jackal and Hyena get recognized as those big #1 TV stars that were all over pop culture. The lone Hyena whips out a terrifying letter opener to hold off a large crowd, and people screamand back away (including presumably armed cops.)

Get it, guuurl.

Jackal, however, decides to be more reasonable.

You probably could have just grabbed it, but that works too I guess.

Now outed to the crowd, they they take the sensible approach and backflip away.

The only way to travel.

They make it to the roof, and—total sidenote, but—I particularly like the sound of footsteps here. I don’t know exactly what it is, but the sound of footsteps in Gargoyles has always stuck out to me. There’s a bit more detail in it than you often get, with slight sliding sounds mixed in with the steps, giving it a cool effect.

Anyway, Jackal and Hyena note how they “planned for something like this.” Which is to say, they hid hang gliders on the roof.

…Hang gliders.

Elisa and Derek, hearing about the mayhem over their police radio, stop Hyena and Jackal from hang gliding away (no, really, what?), but Jackal gets his backflip on and pulls out a rocket launcher that they also hid on the roof as part of their preparations.

At a certain point, you might have overprepared.

Xanatos tackles Jackal before he can cause serious damage, but Derek still has to land the helicopter swiftly since the rocket still hit the back of the craft. In the confusion, Jackal and Hyena manage to hang glide away (still, what?). “Never a gargoyle around when you need one,” Xanatos says to Elisa, pissing her off with his suaveness, as often happens. Then Xanatos, impressed with Derek’s landing skills in the face of crisis, starts taking a liking to him….and offers him a job.

“Even his hands are smooth as a baby angel’s bottom…”

Derek barely resists his charms long enough to give him a firm “Maybe.” The guy is weirded out, of course, but not quite swayed one way or another. Elisa accidentally tips the scales, though, by saying: “Ignore him Derek, he’s just using you to annoy me.”

Not unlike Elisa’s initial interaction with Matt Bluestone, she’s being a total dick here. The difference is that while Elisa’s attitude with Matt was caused by stress, here she’s simply not showing much regard for her brother’s feelings. She might be right about Xanatos, but she doesn’t even consider her that her brother might, you know, have liked being told that he’s good at his job. The way it’s phrased, it’s clear that Elisa has blinders on to everything in this situation outside of “Xanatos has an ulterior motive!” It’s not untrue, but no matter what Elisa knows, I can’t help but side with Derek on this one. Casting off the very possibilitythat Xanatos honestly gave Derek a compliment is an insult, because it implies that there’s no way he canbe that good at it. As we learn a couple of scenes later, Elisa is Derek’s big sister, and getting belittled by an older sibling is a common Achilles’ Heel for a lot of younger siblings.

In Elisa’s defense, she shows clear worry about her brother when he’s not around. She’s being admirably active here, actually, going to the gargoyles for help. They’re pretty cool about it, too, offering to reveal themselves to him as a way to convince him of Xanatos’s true nature. Lex, however, is totally obsessed with Jackal and Hyena being missing because of his vendetta. Be prepared, because this continues for a while (and I’ll touch on it.)

Elisa immediately goes to tell Derek everything without hesitation, which is already refreshing for a Big TV Secret. But in an even better twist, he cuts her off to tell her he’s taking the job. That passing, indirect and unintentional insult Elisa threw out hurt him more than she realized, and it’s pushed him to the proverbial dark side. And this has all happened within the first 10 minutes!

Then, finally, we see Elisa having drinks with someone outside of work. It’s her father.

It’s a kids’ show though, so he’s probably just drinking root beer.

Elisa discusses the dilemma and tries to spin it from a different perspective: she believes it’d kill his mother if he quits “the family business” (an interesting little character tidbit.) Hilariously, this scene immediately jump cuts to their mom telling Derek that of course it’s okay the quit if that’s what he wants to do. This episode does a really stand-up job at twisting this kind of formula.

Elisa heads into the locker room talk to Derek. In spite of all her naked coworkers, Elisa’s just all, “Eh, nothin’ to see here.”

Look at Matt in his tighty whities!

The two argue again, but Derek is being more and more stand-offish. At this point, it’s become less about whether it’s right to take the job, and more about his big sister being both a weirdo (she says Xanatos practically is the Prince of Darkness!) and trying to control his life. We don’t shed any light on their past, really, but the implication seems to be that this isn’t a one-time occurrence. Elisa’s interactions with Goliath have often involved her constantly pushing and pushing and pushing him to make a decision, like the multi-episode move from the castle. She was right in that case, and her secondary function as an adviser for the clan justifies it. But it’s starting to seem like being a self-righteous bossypants (even if for good reason) is part of her nature. Coupled with good instincts, that makes her a good, even if forceful, kind of protector; but it’s got to be grating to someone like her brother, especially when he thinks her instincts are wrong.

Elisa isn’t going to let this go, so she asks the gargoyles to keep an eye on him…if they can get along. It seems that the bickering over the video game earlier wasn’t just a joke, this is a full-on resurgence of the Trio’s antagonism toward each other from the early episodes. It’d been put on the backburner lately, mostly due to separation and dire circumstances. But now that they’ve settled in, the slightest little frustration ignites a spat. It was Lex hogging the video game earlier, and now it’s Lex continuing to be obsessive about The Pack.

YOOOOOOU FARTED!!!

I don’t think Lex being at the center of these arguments was meant to be anything insidious, if that’s where it sounds like I’m leading; it’s more convenience, really. This is an episode about sibling relationships, and including sibling villains Jackal and Hyena—the only brother/sister villains we’ve had so far—just-so-happened to be tied to Lex, giving him motivation to spark these arguments. Jackal and Hyena themselves don’t really contribute much other than a sly connection to the theme, though I guess you could say their borderline-incestousness is at least, well, different from any other sibling relationship on the show. Though the episode doesn’t go as deep as it could in juxtaposing all these relationships, it’s worth noting the care it took to weaving these threads together to fit the theme, much better than the stitched-together “Let’s just mention homes a lot” faux-theme of “Enter Macbeth”.

Jackal and Hyena are sanctioned by Fox via phone call to waste Xanatos, just because he’s a meanie. They decide to go all-out, using a hi-tech helicopter trying to shoot him down just because, you know, revenge and whatever. Gotta give props for this, too, since it uses the villains’ obvious insanity to justify a crazy assassination plot that has next to no motivation whatsoever.

Maybe you should assassinate them from your HANG GLIDERS.

The Trio works together to take out Jackal and Hyena, throwing them out of the copter. It turns out they have parachutes, but…would our heroes really know that? I’m pretty sure they figured they’d just die from this.

Nah, he’s good.

Lex uses his knowledge of the flight simulator to keep the copter from crashing on the people below, and we get some cute banter from Brooklyn, like “Famous last words,” and a nicely contextualized “Use the force, Lex.” It’s cheesy, but it’s subdued enough that it totally lands. The whole sequence where they try to land is very cool.

Nah, they’re good.

They do manage to get it on the ground, and Lex claims he can get it all fixed up by the next night.

He can repair THAT overnight, but it takes my mechanic a week to fix a broken belt on my car?

More desperate now that the job with Xanatos has clearly put Derek in danger, Elisa decides to step up her game. Curiously, she goes to Fox in prison, and suddenly the flat leader of who’ve thus far been the weakest villains in the show becomes hella interesting.

L’Oréal: Because you’re worth it.

This entire scene is absolutely stunning, played with almost no music whatsoever, with a spot-on performance by Laura San Giacomo, and beautifully animated facial expressions. It’s a quiet scene full of exposition—something Gargoyles has already often collapsed under the weight of—but not only is it engaging, it’s enlightening for multiple characters. Fox reveals that she knows everything, and explains how Xanatos set up own assassination attempt because he wanted Derek, because he gets what he wants. “You’re so far behind him, he’s pathetic. He told me to tell you,” she says. “He’s the most brilliant man on the face of the earth.” We know Xanatos is the master manipulator, but the scale on which he’s playing for something so simple is legitimately frightening. Fox is caught somewhere between being his accomplice and being utterly infatuated by him, to the point that sunlight magically starts shining on her.

“Part of your woooorld!”

Elisa is left feeling like an utter failure; defenseless, powerless, and belittled.

Except she’s not. This episode is a bit of a roller coaster ride, constantly shifting who’s ahead at every turn. Elisa taped the conversation, which implies that somehow she thought Fox might be in on the charade. This implies that she connected the dots between Xanatos and The Pack (he created them), which would be some good detective work. Granted, this is all conjecture and is kind of a plot hole since it’s never explained, but I don’t mind believing that Elisa’s smart enough to have figured this out offscreen

None of this matters, though, because we later find out that Xanatos’s personal retreat is called Xanadu. I am abso-fucking-lutely not making that up.

Anyway, Elisa and the gargs follow Xanatos and Derek there, and it’s a good thing they do, since Hyena and Jackal are carrying their vendetta to the extreme.

Dressed for the best.

The gargoyles show up to save the day, like they do, but this time in the new Hi-Tech Super Gargoyle Chopper with net-missle and blinding light action!

Available wherever toys are stored. Parent or Guardian permission is required.

...And for some reason, Hyena’s face seems to imply that this is part of yet ANOTHER maaaaaaaaster plaaaaaaaan.

“Imma get the J tonight…”

Afterwards, Elisa tries to have a moment with Derek and introduce him to the gargoyles—only to find out that he already knows. Xanatos one-upped her once again, telling him about how “He tried to help them, but he rejected them,” and spinning his lies, blackmail and murder attempts as little “mistakes.”

“It’s no big deal, we’ve ALL tried to kill our friends once or twice, haven’t we?”

Goliath breaks up the sibling squabble and gives them a silly little speech about the importance of family, how his is dead, etc. etc. While the deeper pathos are appreciated, tying in Goliath’s tragic backstory is a bit unnecessary. The story works better as a grounded one, something any brother or sister can relate to. Elisa is only looking out for her little brother, but she’s gone about it so harshly that all it’s done is alienate him and deny him a choice. Had she left him to make his own choice when Xanatos first offered him the job, he probably would have brushed it off. Instead, Elisa tried to force Derek into her viewpoint, and that pushed him toward the guy who was leaving it up to him. Elisa admits to her mistakes, and tries to make up to him by giving him the choice of listening to the tape. But by this point—and if this really has been going on all their lives—it’s too late for him to listen to his pushy big sister.

“Where do I plug in my Apple earbuds?”

To contrast this, the Trio subplot is resolved after they all see how well Lex’s plans worked. Or something like that. It doesn’t really matter; the point is, at the end of the day, they’re still brothers and warriors who fight side-by-side. They may bicker and disagree from time-to-time, but they’ll always be there for each other. When they turn to stone at night, they do it together, and they wake up together the next morning. At the end of the day, they aren’t alone.

But at the end of the day for Elisa, after her friends have turned to stone and her family has gone to live their own lives, where does she end up?

“Her Brother’s Keeper” continues the upward swing of this season’s final quarter into the mature territory the show is known for. The pilot dealt with death and tragedy and the horror of humanity, sure. But there’s a very specific horror involved when the parts of your life you hold most dear are lost to you. Despite what the uplifting orchestra might suggest sometimes, the entire first season has been decidedly cynical thus far, with someone somewhere always managing to sneak some win for the bad guys every week. “Her Brother’s Keeper” doesn’t even try to hide that, but its events aren’t what are chilling about it. Derek is alive and well, after all, and has proven that he can take care of himself. There’s no reason he can’t come to his senses down the line, or listen to that tape and become a spy on Xanatos for Elisa. He could become a valuable asset, right? However, the ominous, but uncertain, final shot would suggest otherwise.

Elisa isn’t a brooding superhero who had great responsibility thrust upon her. She chose to be a protector, as a cop and of the gargoyles, something she had to know would require time, effort, and sacrifice. There are always consequences for your choices, good or bad. And while she’s managed to keep afloat thus far, it’s only a matter of time before things get worse.

Next week: Worf wakes up in the first season finale.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/lead-your-own-life-her-brothers-keeper/feed/215durkinator271234Give him a hand! All hands on deck! High five! I don't know, I couldn't think of a caption for this.6798The only way to travel.11You were just going to hang glide without that, or....?"Even his hands are smooth as a baby angel's bottom..."It's a kids' show though, so he's probably just drinking root beer.Look at Matt in his tighty whities!YOOOOOOU FARTED!!!Maybe you should assassinate them from your HANG GLIDERS.Nah, he's good.Nah, they're good.He can repair THAT overnight, but it takes my mechanic a week to fix a broken belt?L'Oréal: Because you're worth it."Part of your woooorld!"25Dressed for the best.Available wherever toys are stored. Parent or Guardian permission is required.Cool screenshot is cool"Imma get the G tonight...""It's no big deal, we've ALL tried to kill our friends once or twice, haven't we?""Where do I plug in my Apple earbuds?"3233A Clever Old Thing: “Long Way to Morning”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/a-clever-old-thing-long-way-to-morning/
https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/a-clever-old-thing-long-way-to-morning/#respondFri, 28 Jun 2013 03:41:01 +0000http://weliveagain.wordpress.com/?p=607Continue reading →]]>

Old age is a strange topic for shows in the 6-11 (or even 12-18) demographic to hit. But it’s a recurring theme in numerous animated shows past and present; I mean, consider that the entire concietof Batman Beyond is “What happens when Bruce Wayne becomes too old?” Even stranger, that concept of “too old” is often dealt with better than any actual child-centered tales are in childrens’ programming. After a run of wacky action, colorful villains and broad morality tales establishing its first season, Gargoyles started to slow down and look at the more “mature” characters with “The Edge,” and takes it to the next level with “Long Way to Morning”—a belated spotlight on our beloved Old Beard.

Right from the start, this episode sets itself apart from its predecessors: it opens with a pre-“Awakening” flashback in Scotland. This is the first time the show has flashed back, and thus the first hint that the characters we met in the first two episodes have not been forgotten.

“Let my giant MAN HANDS tuck you in, sweetheart.”

A King tells his daughter, who we realize is a younger Katherine from the pilot, to “Go to sleep or the gargoyles will get ya.” This is promptly followed by family friend Hudson, an aforementioned gargoyle that would get her, popping out. It’s pretty much like if you told your kids stories of the Boogeyman attacking them, and then introducing them to their new babysitter, the Boogeyman.

I’M HERE TO DEVOUR YOUR BLOOD AND BONES and also I love you.

That’s actually not a criticism, though, oddly enough. It infers Katherine’s character as we came to know her, for one—why she tolerates the gargoyles even though she hates them. And it’s not completely without precedent; it’s not any different than people who throw out homophobic and racist jokes but shrug them off because “I’ve got plenty of gay/black/etc. friends!” or “Hey all jokes are kinda racist!” a la Paula Deen. Hudson sort of calls the King out on it, but doesn’t try too hard since he’s never been the outspoken activist type. The King just brushes him off for being “too sensitive.” It’s kind of hilarious how relevant and familiar this scenario is to current culture, isn’t it?

We get some exposition about the Archmage, someone who’s apparently a villain or whatever, who has “returned” wanting “revenge” on the King. There aren’t any specifics, but they don’t really matter because the Archmage shows up within 10 seconds of his first mention. Any other time I’d call this shoddy writing, but as we learn, this attack is not meant to be the focus. The Archmage gets his revenge pretty quickly, using his terrifying, malevolent wizardly to…shoot a blowdart.

It’s cool that it’s made out of his staff, but…magic?

Hudson isn’t able to stop the dart from hitting the King, and it poisons him. Katherine runs out after the Archmage bolts, and attempts to do that “sad girl weakly weeping/punching a big man” thing they do on TV all the time. I mean, that’s kind of what it looks like. The animation in this episode is kind of awful again, unfortunately. In any case, she’s angry because she automatically assumes Hudson did it, which has absolutely nothing to do with the xenophobic comments her father has gradually instilled in her, nothing at all.

Get it, girl.

In the present, Broadway reveals that his tastes have suddenly become more refined than eat everything everywhere all the time, as he wants blintzes for breakfast. Hudson, meanwhile, is being all introspective, “just dreaming old dreams.” If it’s not obvious yet, this is going to be the first Hudson-centric episode, and it’s already setting itself apart from the spotlights on the Trio.

The Trio themselves are something of an experiment, each character starting out as an individual conciet (the cool one, the inquisitive one, the fat one) totally devoid of baggage so they could grow and expand without restraint. “The Thrill of the Hunt” and “Temptation” capitalized on this, giving the characters new things to learn and do, but without too much history behind them, there was also time to introduce new villains and larger philosophical concepts. “Deadly Force” didn’t develop Broadway much for the sake of the bigger story, but not to the episode’s detriment, and it also shed new light on his naivete.

All that’s to say: none of those stories would work for Hudson. While visually, he’s “the old one,” he was established in the first three parts of “Awakening” as being a third of the Goliath/Demona/Hudson trio that led the clan. He was there when all the shit went down, and Goliath probably would have killed a lot of people if Hudson hadn’t been there to bring him down with his calm wisdom and advice and stuff. That dynamic faded into the background after around “Awakening, Part Three”, when Elisa started fulfilling that role for Goliath, leaving Hudson to be the butt of “Americans watch too much TV jokes.” Over. And over. And over. There’s a level of tragedy to it, though; that the once-high ranking gargoyle is now just fat grampa sitting around all day and complaining. He doesn’t fit in with this world.

Hey, at least he has a beard flowing majestically in the wind.

But let’s pause this discussion for a brief moment. Because we cut to Elisa’s place where—wait, wasn’t she going to be keeping her gun in a safe place from now on? Because…

The last place anyone would look!

Anyway, Demona breaks in, and Elisa takes fighting stance.

Nailed it.

Demona crashes in and she shoots her with a …laser…dart?

Wait

Hold on

What?!

AND THEN THE SHOW KEEPS UP ITS LIBERAL SECOND-AMENDMENT HATING HIPPIE AGENDA.

Anyway, like the King in the flashback, Elisa has been hit with a poison dart. Demona at least has the decency to explain it, unlike the Archmage: Elisa will be dead in 24 hours and Goliath needs to meet Demona for the antidote. It seems like this will be an obvious parallel to the flashback, where Hudson saves Elisa from the poison when he couldn’t save the King. Except, we get a curve ball.

PLOT TWIST: SHE’S A COP! …Wait, what?

No, the dart hit her badge, so she’s totally fine. She takes it to the clan, and though they all know it’s a trap, Goliath wants to go anyway. He makes a good point: if he doesn’t, Demona will know Elisa is alive and come after her again, more ruthlesssly. Goliath also notes that he doesn’t know what to do with her—they can’t lock her up there, and he “doesn’t want to discuss the alternative” because the censors said so (and also that would suck.)

He gives everyone else jobs of protecting Elisa (mostly because Brooklyn is still angry with Demona from the whole Grimorum debacle, and because Lex and Broadway are chopped liver, I guess.) So he’s dragging the least likely candidate and yet his most trusted ally: Old Beard.

“But I’ll miss The Voice!”

The two go to the meeting place. Demona shows up with a laser, because of course she does, and Goliath immediately gets hit by it.

“GODDAMMIT NOW I’LL PROBABLY MISS THE RESULTS SHOW TOO!”

Demona fires her laser at Hudson, but it reflects off the metal in the sword, which is…I mean…sure, why not. Who knows what kind of laser it is, right? It could do that. It allows Hudson to escape with the injured Goliath, and a surprisingly slow-paced action sequence ensues. They crash through the roof (and stage) of a nearby theatre, but our heroes are shielded by all the giant props, and it’s cool that THEATRE SAVES THE DAY, WOOT. “You can run, but you can’t hide. In fact…you can’t even run, ” Demona says.

WHY DIDN’T THEY SET “ENTER MACBETH” IN A THEATRE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER UGH.

Back in Scotland, we see the young Magus being all fabulous and Katherine still being a dumb 8-year-old bitch.

Get it, guuurl.

“This girl is the nastiest skank bitch I’ve ever met. Do not trust her. She is a fugly slut!”

Magus can only heal the King with the Grimorum, which the Archmage has. Hudson, totally committed to saving the life of his racist friend, asks for Goliath and Demona to help him retrieve it. While they all eventually agree to help, Demona totally throws up attitude because “Ugh defeating the Archmage will be haaaaaaaaaard” and “Ew Hudson is like so totallyold now gag me with a spoon.”

Goliath’s all like “Gurl you better check yo self.”

Back in the present, Demona is giving Hudson one last chance to swear fealty to her before leveling the theatre. She does anyway, and one of the notes I took during this sequence episode was, “Fuck demona is killing that theatre so sad,” so you see where my emotion is. “Oh but you’re a clever old thing,” she says, after discovering that he escaped out the window, which isn’t all that clever but eh. And then she immediately calls him foolish when she deduces they went into the sewer.

In the past again, Demona keeps up all her ranting, and says verbatim, “I’ve never seen him look so old.” Within earshot of Hudson.

There’s no way he can here us talking at normal volume directly behind him!

“But his age brings wisdom,” is Goliath’s defense, but that still plays into how his age is the only fact about Hudson that people can come up with, positive or negative. And Hudson is totally aware of it. Broadway’s episode didn’t have people telling him how he needed to lose weight; this one is directly pointing out Hudson’s archetype and spinning it as something tragic.

After deducing that the Archmage “wants to be followed,” they get to his cave, where Demona FREAKS OUT about a cave drawing/etching thing.

Oh no! A vague sketch of some amorphous figures!

In the present again, Hudson and Demona reenact that part in The Fugitive at the sewer dam, and Hudson just fucking jumps like Harrison Ford.

Yeah, she legit gets struck by lightning for absolutely no reason. She also sees it coming somehow? I don’t know. It doesn’t get mentioned ever again, either. I guess this would technically be a big-lipped alligator moment for the episode? Because I don’t get it.

After getting out of the water, Hudson relays to Goliath the rest of the flashback story to keep his spirits up. The three fight the Archmage, who I must point out is voiced flawlessly by the always flawless David Warner. And he uses the much more effective magic missiles now, instead of blowdarts.

I mean nothing against blowdarts BUT COME ON.

They have a pretty forgettable fight and get the Grimorum…mostly thanks to Goliath and Demona getting out of the way when the Archmage runs at them. This malevolent, powerful evil that the kingdom feared and Demona herself was super terrified of facing? He throws himself off a cliff.

Nailed it.

It’s worth noting here that the Archmage’s “master plan” made no sense, and if there was a master plan, it failed fantastically. Why did he poison the King instead of killing him there? Why did he seemingly want to be followed? What did he have to gain? If this gets revealed later on, don’t tell me, because I honestly don’t remember. But in the context of this episode…this little plot was kind of a mess, considering how simple it was.

Anyway, Hudson got his eye cut and blinded in the fight, and the wound automatically turns into the scar we all know and love.

In the present again, they end up in a cemetery, because they would end up in a cemetery.

I don’t think that’s a language.

Demona continues her taunting, telling Hudson what he can’t do because of his age, not unlike her flashback self. She eggs him on to come out, and despite Goliath’s pleas, Hudson says, “I can face her…I just can’t beat her.” And, apparently, decides it’s best to go down fighting. And then shit gets AWESOME.

Damn, girl.

NO REALLY, DAMN GIRL.

Hudson just GOES FUCKING AT HER with his sword. And I mean GOES. AT. HER. He’s still pretty damn spry in his old age, hopping from gravestone to gravestone and not stopping for a single breath. This is the first time we’ve seen him let loose, and so far it’s the best use of that signature sword.

I mean…okay.

Like, he’s just fucking wailing on her. She doesn’t even get to pull the trigger on her laser weapon—he forces her to use it as a blunt force weapon. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, even though the animation is sub-par at best in this episode, this fight is waaaaaaaaaay more epic than when Goliath was fighting Macbeth.

“My years of fencing with a toaster have led up to this moment!”

Goliath tries to help out, but only makes it worse by being a distraction, thus allowing Demona the upper hand. “I’m smarter, stronger and younger than you!” she yells at Hudson—a little on the nose, of course, but it checks out. However, Hudson retorts: “I know something you don’t. Something that only comes with age. …I know how to wait.” It turns out the slow-movingness of the chase sequence was on purpose. It was a long con, an hours-long stall to keep Demona doing her creepy-stalker routine for as long as possible until she got fed up…only for the sun to come up before she could do anything.

This is awesome, and a wonderful payoff for an already strong mini-journey. Unfortunately, this last exchange is undermined by Demona’s previous comments that imply she’s been alive for a really long time (and spoiler: she’s totally over a thousand years old.) We aren’t supposed to know it for a fact yet, but it’s been pretty heavily implied. So, while I totally get what they’re trying to do here, the fact that this is Demona voicing the “youth” side of the argument and not, well, every other villain ever, seriously hurts an otherwise strong juxtaposition. But in any case, the idea behind it, and the execution surrounding that logistical slip-up, is fantastic.

Back in the past, our heroes return to the King with the Grimorum. However, Hudson decides to step down as leader and have Goliath step up, which has nothing to do with all his friends’ comments about how lousy he is, etc. Nothing at all.

“I’m sorry to tell you, Yer Majesty, but…you’re daughter’s a fugly bitch. And you’re still kind of a bigot.”

In any case, Goliath still looks fondly on his loyal mentor, and might be the only one who still thinks he’s pretty damn competent regardless of his age. Thus, he asks Hudson to stand by his side as an adviser/second-in-command/what-have-you. It’s evident what they’re dynamic is, now: Hudson forced Goliath to grow up, but Goliath is never, ever going to stop respecting the one who came before him.

Bros.

In the present again, they wake up from their stone sleep and Goliath is healed. Since he’s a total trump card, Demona’s just got to run scared. She maniacally laughs and tells them the poison has run its course and THERE IS NO ANTIDOTE MUHAHAHAHAHA. Which is…hilarious.

The playful twist that Demona now believes Elisa to be dead is akin to Elisa’s method of breaking the spell on Goliath in “Temptation.” It’s distinctly Gargoyles, a twist that might not be totally necessary, but harkens back to Shakespearean irony and other classical prose; it borders on nonsensical sometimes, and is often tacked on to the story, but it just adds so much flavor. It’s layered with half poetic justice, half…well..nihilism, oddly enough, just in a way that benefits the leads. The universe throws out these random twists of fate for no reason sometimes (Elisa’s badge blocking the dart, the spell in the Grimorum not having horrible consequences) and our heroes just happen to be smart or creative enough to let it work in their favor. Or in this case, it’s just blind luck. And really, there’s something impossibly dark about the idea that, had it not been for that one police badge in the exact right place…Elisa totally would have been dead now. There was no antidote to begin with, right? That’s…rough.

Anyway, Goliath and Hudson do their “Thanks and we’re all still besties” routine. Hudson comments on his old age again, which we’ve come to realize is something that’s been drilled into his head by outside sources constantly, probably before he even started feeling old himself. “There are years of fighting left for you,” Goliath says. Hudson just retorts, “Now there’s something to look forward to.” That’s appropriately dark, isn’t it?

This would be a great image for the cover of my fanfiction, “50 Shades of Garg”.

So, the technical stuff. The animation in this episode is unfortunate. While it’s not on the level of no-running-only-prancing awfulness of “Enter Macbeth”, I’d like to think it justifies the frustrations I had with that episode’s writing and directing beyond just the animation. This week’s animation is pretty piss poor, but there’s a lot of clever direction to cover it up (the use of reflection on Hudson’s sword, and especially the cemetery and sewer/dam sequences.) There’s also lots of creative locations for this episode—I mean, we feature a theatre, a cemetery, and a comically gigantic sewer all in one episode. And the writing is really engaging, of course, especially considering this is an episode where our focal character doesn’t have too many lines, really. So far the episodes after the pilot have been pretty cut and dry structure-wise, and “Long Way to Morning” has broken out of the shell before it’s even become old yet. It’s refreshing to get a “different” episode so early in the run (it’s late in the season, but…only 11 episodes in, total.)

Flyin’ bros.

Now, the meat of it. I’m not what society would call an “old person” myself, far from it. But I do think all of us can relate to the frustration that comes with people making assumptions about you, telling you what you can and can’t do like it’s a fact they’d know better than you. It’s even worse when deep down, you think they might be right. And then your horrors are sustained when what they say about you comes true. People—peers, friends, us as audience members—started billing Hudson as “the old one.” And that’s what he became—just the old guy, watching TV alone with his dog until he can sleep again.

What’s brilliant about “Long Way to Morning” is that, even though all the “EW OLD PEOPLE” comments are incredibly on-the-nose, Hudson’s internal struggle to overcome his own limitations, internal and external, is completely silent. He makes no mention of it until his final, single monologue to Demona. And Ed Asner delivers the fuck out of that monologue. We see Hudson start to doubt himself, we see him become affected by other people doubting him, we see those doubts justified, and then we see him completely overturn those doubts as if he never had them. It’s impeccably underplayed, a level of subtlety Gargoyles has been distinctly missing, what with its end-of-episode morality recaps and loud orchestral music. This whole episode feels very different from beginning to finish, and succeeds because of it.

Hudson very well might not have learned anything from the experience, but he proved to everyone that he’s capable. No other character could have survived this story. Call me crazy, but I think I’ve decided just now that Hudson is my favorite character. “Long Way to Morning” is just that good.

I can’t apologize enough for the delay. Like last year, my lease is up around this time, and I’m packing up and moving to another place, which makes it hard to sit down and do these in the chaos. That, and—shameless plug—there’s a show in Richmond I’m co-producing, co-writing, co-directing, and co-acting in (phew!), and we’ve hit the ground running with getting that up by August. So, you know, I’m not just a lazytown bananapants.

Also, apparently Season Two Volume 2 is on DVD or something? Sort of? You have to join Disney’s Movie Club, the coverart is kind of awful, and something tells me there’s probably no extras, or at least none to the extent of the last DVD. So, you know, yay?

There may or may not be an entry next week, just because of the aforementioned time-consuming things, but it’ll be up within the next two weeks at least. I’m not letting another year go by, I promise. I want to finish season 1, for the love of god!

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/a-clever-old-thing-long-way-to-morning/feed/020durkinator271I'M HERE TO DEVOUR YOUR BLOOD AND BONES and also I love you.It's not my fault you're offended when I say you're a horrible abomination, bro.It's cool that it's made out of his staff, but...magic?Get it, girl.Everything's better with a beard flowing majestically in the wind.The last place anyone would look!Nailed it.WaitHold onWhat?!Liberal hippie agenda!At least it wasn't a bible.But I'll miss "The Voice"!19WHY DIDN'T THEY SET "ENTER MACBETH" IN A THEATRE IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH BETTER UGH.Get it, guuurl.This girl is the nastiest skank bItch I've ever met. Do not trust her. She is a fugly slut!Goliath's all "Gurl you better check yo self."There's no way he can here us talking at normal volume directly behind him!Oh no! A vague sketch of an amorphous figure!http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=12_EjQKJH9829I mean nothing against blowdarts BUT COME ON.313233It's like some crappy variation of Wolverine's power. Instant healing with scars!I don't think that's a language.Damn, girl.NO REALLY, DAMN GIRL.I mean...okay.40"I'm sorry to tell you, Yer Majesty, but...you're daughter's a fugly bitch."Bros.Awwwww look at da cutie.45Cool shot I just felt like screencapping.The Best Friend You Have In This World: “The Edge”https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/the-best-friend-you-have-in-this-world-the-edge/
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Even though this show is called Gargoyles, we’ve got a wealth of human characters on the roster that, in a lot of ways, flesh out this world better than our main clan. Elisa Maza and David Xanatos are near polar opposites, but they’ve both forcibly intertwined themselves in the this strange new world, albeit for very different reasons. The existence of the gargoyles is going to make an impact on them both (and vice versa), and though this episode doesn’t go terribly far with that concept, it still delivers one of the strongest, most straightforward episodes of the season.

The animation is cleary about a kajillion times better right from the get-go. I harped a whole heckuva lot last week about how important animation is in an action cartoon, so I don’t really need to say more. This team admittedly exagerrates some movements a bit too much, and makes the characters’ mouths occasionally stretch like a snake’s jaw when they talk, but for the most part the movement is impeccably fluid, shadows are well-utilized and care is taken in the big moments. So I’ll just leave it at that.

We open with a training session between Xanatos and Owen, scored with that African/Austrailian whistling instrument the show occasionally uses in favor of the loud orchestral…and it’s a nice break from it. Owen wipes the floor with Xanatos (who still puts up a decent fight.) Owen asks, “Would you rather I pretend to lose?” Xanatos retorts, “I’d fire you if you did.”

He’s mastered the deadly ancient art of the High Five.

After he wipes off his sweat and puts on his Rolex, because he’s rich and stuff, Xanatos laments that he’s losing his toughness. Though he doesn’t clearly show it, he’s nervous that he might merely be David Xanatos, not David Fucking Xanatos. This is probably the first time we’ve seen him with a legitimate character flaw (outside of being, like, obsessive and kind of a villain sometimes.) The guy is terrified of weakness, something that fits completely into what we’ve already seen of his oozing-with-confidence persona. He strives to be as close to perfect as he can be, so even the slightest cracks are huge for him. That fear might very well be a weakness all of its own. After all, he has to compensate by showing he’s a badass when he…moves his meeting up an hour. Becuse that’s hardcore…?

Meanwhile, Elisa shows up to the police station with a bulky definitely-not-HD TV, which the redhead cop we briefly saw in “Deadly Force” offers his assistance with carrying.

How do I…hold all this TV?

Elisa finds out from Chief Chavez that she’s getting a partner because of the whole “being a cop is dangerous” thing. More to the point, Elisa’s injury in “Deadly Force” is cited as a reason, but that’s kind of weird because a) it was an accident and b) how did Elisa explain it was an accident without revealing that the shooter was a big gargoyle? It’s a nitpick, but it’s also one that gets bigger the more you think about it.

Either way, her new partner is Matt Bluestone, that smarmy redhead dude from earlier. Elisa, of course, is rightfully frustrated with him, because he’s just so annoying. Like…he’s so polite! And…and…he offered to help her carry a TV!

Smug bastard.

Okay, it is understandable for Elisa to get a little annoyed, considering the role she’s taken on as a Secret Gargoyle Ambassador of sorts. But beyond that, for someone who’s apparently been independent in career most of the time, getting asigned a partner might be an affront to her ego. It’s like backtracking and giving a kid a babysitter even after they’d been home alone without one.

But at the same time…she’s being kind of a dick. Matt’s even surprisingly understanding about the annoyance he’s causing. “There must be some kind of consipiracy going on to make my life difficult,” Elisa says. Come on, girl. Things can (and will) get a whole lot worse.

New FWP spokesperson.

However, I’ll go ahead and be apologetic and overly praising of this, because I like it a lot. Elisa is a normal human being, and that’s kind of her entire point in this show thus far—to be the straight man. She’s the human who showcases all the good humanity has to offer, even if she’s not necessarily the smartest/strongest/most flawless character. So, yeah, there are gonna be days when she’s in a crappy mood. Call it whatever you will, but she got up on the wrong side of the bed today, and these minor annoyances are getting on her nerves, especially considering in both her job as a cop and as a protector of the gargoyles, she’s only out to help.

She heads upstairs with the TV, revealing that the that the clock tower the clan is now staying in is actually above the police station. This will obviously be convenient for the story later on, but it’s also one of those cool ideas that works so well in an overarching mythology. Batman’s Batcave is under Wayne Manor; the Clock Tower is over the Police Station. It’s something that, had Gargoyles become more of a mythic superhero universe rather than a cult favorite, might be ingrained in pop culture.

After giving the gift of television, Elisa goes up to the library, where Goliath is doing his typical Goliath-y thing.

It’s like the reverse of Beast giving Belle a library, without the Stockholm Syndrome.

I’m kind of unclear on exactly where this library is; it kinda looks like it’s just in the next door building in the establishing shot, but they way they treat its accessibility implies that it’s in the same building (which means this building houses a police station, library, and massive clock tower, which probably isn’t right.) I’m sure the fandom has already answered this completely, but from this episode, it’s a little unclear.

Either way, after a cute exchange, (“What are you reading?” / “Doestevsky.” / “Yeah? Who’s it by?”) Goliath expresses his concerns about Xanatos. “You didn’t lose a castle, you gained a library,” Elisa says. But Goliath refutes this by reinforcing how they’re still “Strangers in a strange land.” The dialogue in this exchange is pure Gargoyles writing at its best; a very poetic, flowery style of speech packed in with literary reference after reference, but with tinges of real world idioms and syntax. Goliath may quote the Bible and mention Doestevsky, but Elisa will crack jokes and talk about karma.

Don’t take it out on Dostoevsky, Goliath!

Later, the gargs spot a news story on their new not-six-inch TV: Xanatos is being heralded as a philanthropist for doinating an ugly piece of jewelry called The Eye of Odin to a museum, which Xanatos calls “a great tax write-off.”

Yeah…gorgeous.

Goliath is enraged about this, of course, still seething over the loss of his castle to Xanatos. What he doesn’t see is, after the cameras turn off, the reporter grills Xanatos about his prison record. Xanatos fires back by pretty much throwing a pity party…and it’s awesome.

Meanwhile, a thing is happening.

Sup guuuuurl.

But we’ll get back to that in a sec. Elisa is busy being annoyed by her new partner, who’s rambling on about the Illuminati, of all things. Elisa seems to have softened up to him a bit and indulges him, but is still quick to retort, “I don’t care about UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, or secret societies,” because “the world’s strange enough as it is.” Yup. No foreshadowing at all in that.

“This coming from the only woman in the world with natural blue hair.”

In any case, Matt is slowly being revealed as quite a loveable cook. And this is a pretty cool twist on the Mulder/Scully archetype, where the male believer is completely oblivious to the weirdness, and the skeptic female is the one who’s protecting it. It’s also a fun peek into the alternate universe where Elisa and Matt were partners from the start; had things gone differently, the mystery of the gargoyles could have been a one-episode stint on Bluestone and Maza, a freak-of-the-week procedural Thursdays at 10pm on NBC. It’s a cool example of how well this show transcends multiple genres, even in brief moments.

Back at the museum, a mysteeeeeeeerious shadow (no, not that one) is breaking in.

Shadows? In GARGOYLES?!

There’s robot sounds and red eyes, so in true Gargoyles fashion, the thing in shadow is totally obvious. Matt and Elisa spot the thing breaking out and Elisa tries to prevent Matt from shooting it, thinking it’s Goliath. But deduces it can’t be him when she heres the bullets bounce of metal, because last time she checked Goliath isn’t a Terminator.

Elisa is also learning the ancient art of the High Five.

She brings this news to the clan, already deducing that it must be the Steel Clan. The evidence builds up further when they see the news broadcast footage of the graceful, light ninja-like touch of the thieves.

Nailed it.

The identity theft sets Goliath off the edge, and he storms off with the clan to rip Xanatos’s head off. Elisa gives chase, rightfully assuming that another murder on the main character’s head probably wouldn’t get past the censors this time. And she turns into Rapunzel for a hot second, just because.

Guuuurl, your hair.

Matt catches her and barges in, against her wishes. “This is one time I don’t want a partner.” / “Yeah? That’s when you need them the most.” I think I like Matt. Like, a lot.

“Does he know I farted?”

Goliath confronts Xanatos at the castle. And being David Fucking Xanatos, he’s decked himself in every stereotypical “I’m a muthafuckin’ badass” costume trope possible, outside of a shotgun.

Buh-bye pants.

“I’m the best friend you have in this world,” Xanatos coldly responds to Goliath’s accusations. The windy, stormy weather and Xanatos’s clear “there’s more than meets the eye” confidence makes everything incredibly off-kilter, and it’s wonderfully executed. Elisa, meanwhile, is trying to get up to the castle, but Owen isn’t being very forthcoming. Elisa’s attempts to dart past him, but he hilariously brick walls her every time.

Headbutts solve everything.

Xanatos reveals his plan: to use the Steel Clan get everyone to hate the gargoyles. They’ll have to concede and live in his research facility for protection (and, like, probing and stuff we all assume.) The thing that makes Xanatos so awesome here, even while being a bastard, is the same thing I described back in his first appearance. He is just so ridiculously confident, setting up his ultimatum not as the best choice, but as the only choice. He’s so good at it, you kind of forget that he’s full of shit.

Goliath responds to this just as you’d expect: taking it out on a nearby lamp.

Reasonable reaction.

Goliath doesn’t fight him on it or anything, weirdly enough, and just takes off with the clan. It’s a little convenient, but it’s fair that Goliath would feel out of options at this point—after all, Xanatos is very convincing. Elisa sees them fly away and gives chase; Matt’s just like, “Uh…sure, whatever.”

If you hadn’t noticed yet, there hasn’t been much action in the episode.

Oh, there it is.

The Steel Clan comes after them, and a pretty awesome in-flight battle ensues. There’s a lot of creative stuff going on here with the action all taking place in the air, much better than many of the hand-to-hand sequences we’ve had thus far. There is some weirdness, though, like shots of the public witnessing the mayhem from below and automatically deducing that they’re gargoyles…even though all they can see is lasers.

It’s The Gargoyle, actually, the name of a new 28mm special ops laser. We all know New Yorkers are big laser aficionados.

We also hear: “Looks like that urban myth about gargoyles just became urban reality.” Even though they were all clearly in the middle of the street for like an hour last week, but whatever.

The Steel Clan actually wipes the floor with our heroes, but doesn’t take them out completely when they have the chance. They smartly figure out that he wants to follow them to their new home, because “Xanatos doesn’t want to destroy us. He wants to dominate us.” Again, this reinforces the idea that Xanatos isn’t out to be violent or vengeful or anything, he simply has some goals he wants to meet. Those goals just-so-happen to be at the cost of the gargoyles’ freedom; he wants control, because who wouldn’t want control over these cool dudes?

Our heroes decide to use this as a motivation, though—they have to stop the Steel Clan right here, right now, and there’s no turning back. They also identify that the red one is particularly strong.

Red? More like RAD!

They take the fight to the Statue of Liberty—and frankly, I’m surprised this is only the first time we’ve had a fight take place there. The garg’s focus on defeating the clan gives them the upper hand as they take them on one-by-one. They take them out with clever techniques, like flying into a wall and then not flying into the wall you thought they were flying into (basic cartoon and action movie fare, essentially.)

Also, Broadway does this.

What I kind of like about these battles is that they’re oddly slow, being in the air. There’s a certain level of grace that has to be used for this all to work, so slowing things down makes sense. But it also makes things much easier to follow than usual, the opposite of the everythingisfastandexplodingandcamerasareshakingnonstop Michael Bay fare we’re used to nowadays.

GIVE HIM A HAND, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN!

Eventually, the red robot is standing alone after his comrades are clearly destroyed. …Well, not clearly enough, I guess, because it still has to used the computer to identify them as “status destroyed” even when they’re IN PIECES. (This makes even less sense when we find out what’s really going on.)

It’s just a little disassembled and on fire…it’s still good, it’s still good!

And when I say “what’s really going on,” I mean, that, in addition to being inexplicably strong, this red guy also uses familiar martial arts moves when in hand-to-hand combat with Goliath.

Someone out there had to be asking for Goliath-on-Goliath action, right?

But even in spite of martial arts prowess, red cuts his losses and retreats. Elisa and Matt show up in a helicopter with the TV reporter from earlier for some reason, but they literally don’t do anything.

Well, I guess we do get some exposition out of Elisa after the battle. Mainly that “the public’s been reassured that the gargoyles were robots.” So…destructive terrorist jewel-thief robots won’t case widespread public panic? Oh well, it doesn’t matter, since we get Elisa’s sexy face.

9 episodes of sexual tension down, 56 more to go!

In a nice optimistic beat, even in spite of the circumstances, Goliath feels good that they defeated (most of ) the Steel Clan, which means they can do it again if Xanatos continues with his plan.

We get one last scene with Matt, too, where he tries to convince Chief Chavez that there are gargoyles out there who aren’t robots. I’m kind of with him in the public’s denial…after all, they’re cool with flying indestructible terrorist robots, but NOT another species? He’s now out to prove their existence, giving him a clear goal that’s surely going to lead somewhere. Matt’s only been on the show substantially for this one episode, but he’s already shown his role in the show—the “question everything” guy who also functions as a foil to Elisa—and he has more of a definitive goal than any of the main characters that this point. Because really, everyone else is just meandering until something bad happens, aside from Xanatos.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE. UP THERE. THE TRUTH IS UP ABOVE US. LITERALLY. ABOVE OUR HEADS IN OUR BUILDING.

The biggest challenge about getting through season one is its own wide breadth. The idea of such a large ensemble cast, and that the show dares to flesh out not only the gargoyle clan, but numerous villains and side characters, is depth-defying. It’s only added more to the fray every other episode; Matt Bluestone, who could easily be one-off comic relief/conflict now has a set of motives and a purpose. We’ve barely gotten to know Elisa at this point, so at times this is a little overwhelming. But in spite of that, Matt’s addition is successful. Tom Wilson is a wonderful addition to the voice cast, adding a very conversational, realistic type of speaking style that makes Matt feel like he was pulled out of NYPD Blue. So even though we’ve gotten lots crammed into the show so far, the writers are clearly adept enough to handle it.

But let’s not forget about the ending. In a sorta-kinda shocker, we find out that Xanatos himself was the red robot all along! Even though he didn’t acquire the gargoyles’ home or get them in his lab, he did manage to get his Eye of Odin back, the city owes him a favor for donating it, he tested his “prototype battle exoframe” (???), and the most important thing: he was able to stand up against Golith, the greatest warrior alive. “I’d say I’ve still got the edge.”

STOP BEING SO DAMN PRETTY

While this certainly isn’t the biggest reveal of the show, that there wasn’t a mystery being teased works in its favor. We weren’t spending the half hour trying to deduce the identity of red because no one else was. So when it turned out it was Xanatos the whole time, while shocking isn’t the right word, it’s definitely a pleasant surprise. It also works because it plays into what we established right at the beginning: Xanatos does actually fail, sort of, a little bit. But he manages to get a win of sorts out of that failure. Through retreating, he proved to himself that he could at least stand up to Goliath, which regained the confidence he was losing at the beginning. You could say that’s nothing more than optimism, I guess, but it speaks to Xanatos’s ability to win at everything somehow, even if it’s in an abstract way. It’s kind of ridiculous that the villain of this show never, ever, ever loses. Ever. And that flawlessness in a world full of flawed characters is what makes him such an interesting character.

There’s not a whole lot to this episode, ultimately. In a way, it serves multiple purposes: “A day in the life” for Elisa, the introduction of Matt, Goliath coming to terms with losing the castle, and Xanatos reinforcing that he’s a fucking badass. Elisa’s day doesn’t really lead to anything other than segueing into Matt’s introduction, which is unfortunate. But getting a spotlight on our human supporting characters is a nice change of pace for the show, especially in light of all the “gargoyles learn their way around the modern world” stories we’ve had thus far.

“The Edge” is also a nice foil to “Enter Macbeth”. It’s another simple-structured, action-heavy installment, and is less noteworthy in the grand scheme of things. But unlike “Enter Macbeth”, the action—which is much better animated this time, obviously—is not the centerpiece. The revelation about Macbeth last week, which was meant to be the centerpiece, was haphazardly thrown in with the action, and ultimately had little-to-no actual significance to that story. But “The Edge” uses action for the sake of the character development. It’s a carefully laid out endeavor, with all the pieces there to inform the characters and, in the case of Matt, set up future stories. This is a fairly forgettable episode for sure, but only because it functions as a way to transition to the bigger stories down the line. But it’s necessary, and for time you’re watching it, it’s totally enjoyable.

And also, David Fucking Xanatos.

Next week, however: Ed Fucking Asner.

]]>https://weliveagain.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/the-best-friend-you-have-in-this-world-the-edge/feed/033durkinator27He's mastered the deadly ancient art of the High Five.How do I...hold all this TV?Smug bastard."I'm literally getting a headache from all your stupid."13Don't take it out on Dostoevsky, Goliath!Yeah...gorgeous.Sup guuuuurl.21Shadows? In GARGOYLES?!Elisa is also learning the ancient art of the High Five.Nailed it.Guuuurl, you're hair."Does he know I farted?"31Headbutts solve everything.34Reasonable reaction.363841464749485152STOP BEING SO DAMN PRETTY